Sarah Guzman

Wednesday 17 March 2021

Excel Waterfall Chart: How to Create One That Doesn’t Suck

In July 2015 Microsoft announced that the then-upcoming Office 2016 would introduce 6 new charts to their line of charts. The one that was most highly anticipated in the financial community was definitely the built-in Excel waterfall chart.

Tip: Are you using Excel 2013 or Excel 2010? Read to the end of the article to learn how you can create one-click waterfall charts in Excel 2013 and 2010.

Waterfall charts 101

A waterfall chart (also known as a cascade chart or a bridge chart) is a special kind of chart that illustrates how positive or negative values in a data series contribute to the total. In other words, it’s an ideal way to visualize a starting value, the positive and negative changes made to that value, and the resulting end value. In a waterfall chart, the first column is the starting value and the last column is the end value. The floating columns between them are the contributing positive or negative values.

Note: Other fun names for waterfall charts include Mario chart and flying bricks chart, because individual chart elements resemble an old arcade game.

Some people like to connect the lines between the contributions to make the chart look like a bridge (giving us the bridge chart name), while others leave the columns floating.

Uses of waterfall charts

Waterfall charts are popular in the corporate and financial environment because they are very useful for a visualization of the positive and negative movements within a measured quantity or KPI, such as your Monthly Net Profit or Cash Flow.

Other examples of quantitative analyses, where waterfall charts are used, include:

Visualizing profit and loss statements
Comparing product earnings
Highlighting budget changes on a project
Analyzing inventory or sales over a period of time
Showing product value over a period of time
Creating executive dashboards

In a nutshell, use a waterfall chart whenever you want to show how a starting value increases or decreases through a series of positive or negative changes.

Tip: While the most typical waterfall chart is the one with a starting and ending value, you can also create subtotals as visual milestones in the series. These show up as full columns. For example, you might want to use Net revenue and Gross Income as two checkpoints between Gross Revenue and Net income starting and ending values.

How to create a waterfall chart in Excel

Before Office 2016 creating waterfall charts in Excel was a notoriously difficult process.

Note that I used the word “creating” and not “inserting”. That’s right — you did not insert a waterfall chart, you created it.

… using tutorials

To create a waterfall chart in Excel 2013 and earlier, you had to define additional data series (with complicated formulas) in the data table and then make them invisible in the chart.

And we’re not talking about 1 invisible series. If the waterfall chart dipped below zero at one point, you needed at least seven additional series!

Here are just some of the many tutorials on creating a waterfall chart in pre-2016 Excel:

… using templates

To get around having to follow this long process every time, people often resorted to using a waterfall chart template:

Of course, using templates is not ideal. If your data has a different number of categories, you have to modify the template, which again requires additional work.

Ideally, you would create a waterfall chart the same way as any other Excel chart: (1) click inside the data table, (2) click in the ribbon on the chart you want to insert.

… in Excel 2016

Microsoft decided to listen to user feedback and introduced 6 highly requested charts in Excel 2016, including a built-in Excel waterfall chart.

No more templates, additional series, formulas or tinkering with the charts. 2 clicks and your awesome waterfall chart is inserted.

Or is it?

While the addition of waterfall charts in Excel 2016 is a great step forward, the current functionality still leaves much to be desired.

Here are some ways that can help you create better Excel waterfall charts and some things that are still missing.

1. Remember to set the totals

Let’s say we want to have this data table visualized with a waterfall chart: EBITDA of our fictional company for the years 2015, 2016 and the individual contributions of 7 small business units to the change from 2015 to 2016.

This shouldn’t be too hard. Click inside the data table, go to “Insert” tab and click “Insert Waterfall Chart” and then click on the chart. Voila:

OK, technically this is a waterfall chart, but it’s not exactly what we hoped for. In the legend we see Excel 2016 has 3 types of columns in a waterfall chart:

This is correct, but in the chart there are no Total columns, only Increase and Decrease. The first and last columns should be Total (start on the horizontal axis) and to set them as such, we have to double-click on each of them to open the Format Data Point task pane, and check the Set as total box.

You can also right click the data point and select Set as Total from the list of menu options.

Finally, we have our waterfall chart:

2. Ditch the clutter on your visualization

Data visualization best practice is to remove ALL elements from the visualization that are not absolutely necessary (if you’re interested, you can learn more about this in our webinar: Data visualization in depth).

Similar to other Excel charts, the default Excel waterfall chart also suffers from having too much clutter. The legend, the vertical axis and labels, the horizontal grid lines — none of them contribute to the reader’s better understanding of the data. If anything, they are a distraction.

So, let’s remove all unnecessary elements and write our key message to the title. It’s a shame that the chart title cannot be inserted automatically from a cell.

Tip: To remove the distracting chart elements, right-click on each of them and then click “ Delete”.

Great, this is much better. But it required additional work that would not be required if Excel defaults were better. In Zebra BI for Excel, we’ll show you how to do it better.

3. Break the axis to highlight contributions

This limitation is especially noticeable in waterfall charts, because waterfall charts have essentially two different types of data:

Totals: usually the first and last column in a series.
Contributions: the floating bricks making up the “bridge” between the two totals.

A common problem is that contributions are often very small compared to totals. This is also apparent in our example (see image above).

First, a point of order: this chart correctly visualizes the situation as the contributions really ARE that small compared to totals. Our 2016 result is essentially the same as our 2015 result.

This visualization is also completely in line with IBCS Standards.

However, users (and their bosses) are sometimes more interested in contributions than in totals and the relationship between the two.

In this case the only viable option would be to break the vertical axis and have the totals start at some value larger than 0. Let’s say 35,000. This highlights individual contributions, but risks guiding unaware readers to false conclusions about the data.

You can again resort to using tutorials and templates:

Another, somewhat simpler option is to do the following:

Click on the chart to select it
Re-add vertical axis: Go to Design >> Add Chart Element >> Axes >> Primary Vertical
“Break” vertical axis: right click on the vertical axis and click “Format Axis…”, then under Axis Options write “35000” under Bounds >> Minimum.
Remove vertical axis: right click on the vertical axis and click “Delete”

This is the chart we end up with:

Now the contributions are much more prominent, but there’s no obvious indication that the vertical axis does not start at zero which is really bad because the user does not draw the correct conclusion from the visualization.

4. Add relative contributions in percentages

When analyzing contributions you’re often more interested in relative contributions (in percentages of the total) than in absolute contributions.

Unfortunately if you want to do that in a default Excel waterfall chart, you’re out of luck — you’re stuck with displaying absolute contributions only.

Look to the end of this article to see how easy this is to do in Zebra BI.

5. Highlight differences between totals

Another thing that you’re not able to do in an Excel waterfall chart is display the total difference between 2015 and 2016 in our example.

Sure, you can see in the chart that the 2016 column is higher than the 2015 column (especially now that we cut the vertical axis). But by how much? Unless you can do complex subtractions in your head, you don’t know the exact number. There’s also no way to display the relative difference in percentage.

Since this difference between totals is rather important, it’s definitely a major feature that’s missing in Excel waterfall charts.

Click here to see how Zebra BI does it.

6. Use vertical waterfall charts

We know from the How to Choose the Right Business Chart article that horizontal charts (i.e. the charts that have a horizontal category axis) are used to display time-related data. For everything else we should use vertical charts instead.

Waterfall charts are no exception. Strangely, in Excel 2016 there is no way to insert a vertical waterfall chart. While this feature has been requested, there’s no indication whether it will be implemented and when.

So if you wanted to visualize an income statement with a vertical Excel waterfall chart, you’d again have to resort to using templates and tutorials like this one …

We prepared a demonstration in Zebra BI, so you can see how to create an income statement with vertical waterfall charts.

7. Add (some) subtotals

Since we’re on the subject of visualizing income statements — in a typical income statement there are some categories that are actually sums of several other categories.

For example: you can choose to calculate a sum of all Operating Expenses (OpEx). This better visualizes the relationship between “Revenue” and “Earnings before interest and taxes” (EBIT). EBIT = Revenue — OpEx.

In a table this is easy to do — just write a formula and you’re done.

When you create a waterfall chart in Excel? Not so much. It’s apparently so hard to do it manually that there’s not a single tutorial or template available on the internet.

You can, however, enter subtotals and designate them as such in your waterfall chart. However, you need to calculate them yourself to make sure they are correct.

You can see how Zebra BI automatically creates subtotals in this handy animated gif at the end of this article.

8. Customize your chart with colors

The default color scheme in Excel could be better. Visit the Chart Design tab and open the Change Colors gallery.

Here, you can select a color palette. You can also choose a different theme on the Page Layout tab. To adjust how the colors are used, click the Colors button and select Customize Colors at the bottom of the list.

You can set it up to display positive values in green and negative values in red, which is a common approach in financial reporting.

9. Turn connector lines on or off

Connector lines connect columns to show the movements in values in the chart. You can turn them on or off by right-clicking a data series to open the Format Data Series pane, and checking/unchecking the Show connector lines box.

10. Scale your charts

Finally we arrive at one major feature that’s missing in Excel from the very beginning: scaling multiple charts.

While this problem is not limited to waterfall charts, it’s too important not to mention it here.

Making sure that all related charts in a report or dashboard are on the same scale is one of the most important concepts in data visualization.

If you don’t synchronize scales, don’t even insert the charts

All too often you see two Excel charts side by side with completely different scales. While each of them is an adequate data visualization on its own, you must make sure they are scaled once you put them side by side! Otherwise don’t even insert the charts and just leave the data in a table.

So, how do you synchronize scales of Excel charts? While the procedure is not particularly hard, it is time consuming. It’s a similar procedure that we used to break the axis.

Say we have these two default Excel waterfall charts and we need to scale them:

The first step is to re-add Vertical Axis on both charts.

Click on the first chart to select it
Re-add vertical axis: Go to Design >> Add Chart Element >> Axes >> Primary Vertical
Repeat for the second chart

This is what we have so far:

Now we have to adjust the scale of the right chart to be the same as the left. Right click on the vertical axis and click “ Format Axis…”, then under Axis Options write “ 600” under Bounds >> Minimum.

Remove vertical axis from both charts (right click on the vertical axis and click “ Delete”) and we have our correct visualization:

OK, that wasn’t too bad. Now what if you have a monthly report with 6 waterfall charts on it? Would you do this procedure for 6 charts every month when the data changes? I guess not.

Of course you can automate this, but you have to use VBA to do it. If you don’t want to use VBA, maybe this article from 2012 by Jon Peltier will help you …

There has to be a better way!

If you don’t have time to tweak default Excel waterfall charts and would like to add those advanced features to your waterfall charts with a few clicks, take a look at the animation below:

I’m sure you’ll agree that compared to other methods with following tutorials and using templates linked in this article this looks so easy it’s scary! By the way, you can do this in Excel 2013 and Excel 2010 as well.

Adding relative contributions and difference highlights

Now let’s try to do something that you cannot do with default Excel waterfall charts — relative contributions in % and difference highlights:

You can easily switch between variances displayed in relative and absolute values. You can also control whether an increase is a positive or negative event. We know that in some cases, like when it comes to costs, an increase is a negative development.

Another useful feature we added is highlighting differences between starting and ending values. You can switch between relative and absolute variance or display them both for even better information density.

In this example, you can see that the increase between EBITDA in 2015 and 2016 was 610k or 1.5%.

Creating an income statement with vertical waterfall charts

How about inserting two scaled vertical waterfall charts in an income statement? 2 clicks and you got it. 🙂 Pay attention to the subtotal visualization for OpEx!

The cool thing about this subtotal is that it’s a calculation showing the total of all costs, making for a much more readable chart.

Small multiples with waterfall charts

We saved the best for last: here’s 8 waterfall charts in 2 clicks:

You only need to select a single cell in your data and select the horizontal waterfall chart type from the Contribution button. Zebra BI then creates several charts and gives you control over layout and everything else.

Interested? Try it yourself!

If you’d like to insert waterfall charts like these or any other of the 20+ advanced business charts, give Zebra BI a try here: https://zebrabi.com/excel-add-in/

Originally published at https://zebrabi.com on June 21, 2017.

Excel Waterfall Chart: How to Create One That Doesn’t Suck was originally published in Zebra BI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from https://medium.com/zebra-bi/excel-waterfall-chart-how-to-create-one-that-doesnt-suck-52e57cac672f?source=rss—-371945c254e—4

from
https://polurizer.tumblr.com/post/645889785862488064

from https://ellalerner.blogspot.com/2021/03/excel-waterfall-chart-how-to-create-one.html

from
https://onemilecloser.tumblr.com/post/645893627661385728

Wednesday 10 March 2021

Tableau vs Power BI: which is the best dataviz software in 2021?

Welcome to the Tableau vs Power BI: The Superstore Challenge!

There are two heavyweights in the data visualization space right now — Tableau and Power BI. We think the best way to tackle the Tableau vs Power BI comparison is to take a single case and work with both tools to see what they offer and compare the features.

We will look at features such as geography, tooltips, small multiples, multiple measures, data modelling, …

To conclude, we will take a look at the extensions and custom visuals that both tools support.

At every comparison we’ll look at strengths and weaknesses of both tools.

Note: This Tableau vs Power BI comparison analysis is based on our 1-hour webinar on the same topic. If you prefer to watch the video, scroll to the bottom of this tutorial, enter your details and we’ll send you the webinar recording and all PBIX examples to go along with it.

Tableau vs Power BI — the big picture

Before we get to the nitty gritty of features and head to head comparisons, let’s take a step back and look at the market. In the most recent (February 2021) Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence by Gartner, Power BI extended its lead over competitors. Power BI and Tableau have both been leaders for quite some time. However, Microsoft has been consistently improving its completeness of vision and the ability to execute.

Tableau’s benefits and drawbacks

Tableau started in 2003. It was founded by three guys from the Stanford University who were really interested in data visualization. This was what informed their design thinking — a tool for data exploration, visual exploration and visual analysis. A tool designed by data geeks for data geeks.

It’s no wonder Gartner sees Tableau’s user experience as its main advantage and the tool has several features that are just amazing. It has rightfully garnered large numbers of enthusiastic users that will always recommend it. Tableau’s downside is that it’s not a cloud-native tool and is simply more expensive than Power BI. Price is absolutely one of the main drivers of Power BI’s success.

Power BI’s benefits and drawbacks

On the other hand we have Microsoft Power BI whose ability to execute has improved mainly because of its steps towards AI and tighter integration with Office and Teams. Microsoft has really doubled down on integration to make sure Power BI works seamlessly with its productivity and collaboration products. AI is also poised to deliver great value with features, such as smart narratives, the key influences visual and the outlier detection.

And then there’s the affordable price …

What about Power BI’s drawbacks? There’s Microsoft focus on the cloud which means that the on-premise version is always behind with some functional gaps. There’s also some concerns about governance in really large environments. With thousands and thousands of users and workspaces, it could become difficult to keep the explosion of reports and dashboards under control.

Power BI is on the rise

There’s no denying it. Since its launch in 2015, Power BI has been ascendant. While Tableau has almost a decade of advantage, Microsoft has taken an almost start-up approach. It has an explosive growth and very fast development cycles. After its initial focus on data preparation, Power BI has grown into its role of a data visualization tool. On the other hand, Tableau responded with Tableau Prep to boost its data preparation features.

There is an informal but very effective way to look at how popular a tool is. It’s Stack Overflow. Let’s just look at percentage of questions on Stack Overflow over the years, and you can see how Power BI’s adoption rocketed.

Geography

The first task in our Tableau vs Power BI superstore challenge is… Geography!

In Tableau

Let’s start the comparison in Tableau. The demo included with the tool is the Superstore demo. It’s a typical sales dashboard featuring sales across different geographies, different types of products and different segments. Let’s look at the first page:

This map gives us a profit ratio overview by geographies. We can see in the tooltip that Oregon has some negative profitability and we can review each state individually.

Where do you start to create something like this? Basically, you always start working in a Tableau sheet, which contains one type of visualization. You start with that, and then you can expand on that with its myriad of options.

As you create a new Worksheet, you simply double-click the State measure and Tableau knows we want to work with geography. It’s also easy to drop in the Sales measure and create a simple analysis with a couple of clicks.

This visualization is showing sales in individual states. The tooltip is displaying the name of the Country, State and sales revenue.

It’s just as easy to add Profit Ratio, which is included under calculation measures.

This will deliver the colorful chart seen at the start of this chapter.

In Power BI

So, what about Power BI? We load up our data and click on the State measure.

Just like Tableau, Power BI knows it would be a good idea to show a map. Similar to Tableau, you can switch between a regular map with values shown as circles and Filled Map, which colors individual areas.

To get the same effect in Power BI, we also need to set up Data colors. You find these in the Visualizations pane in the Formattab. Open the Data color section.

After you click on the formula button, a new window pops up, where you set up the colors for each individual measure. Now, select the Profit ratio measure and set it up to move from orange to blue.

Tooltips

In Tableau

Tableau has very flexible tooltips. In the Marks section, you can click on the Tooltip button to edit how your tooltips look and feel.

What you get is an edit box where you can type in whatever you want and change parts of the text. If you need, you can change the font type and sizes and so on, so you can emphasize something or not.

In this case, we even inserted a whole additional chart into the tooltip by clicking the Insert button and adding the Tooltip: Profit Ratio by City sheet into the tooltip. This gives you a way to review the performance of individual cities as you review individual states. Here’s how it looks in action:

In Power BI

Now, let’s look at Power BI. It has a similar concept called Report page tooltip. For this to work, you must create a another page, which will then be displayed in the tooltip of another visual. In our sample file, we’ve created a new page called Tooltip A.

Set up the tooltips in Power BI. You find these in the Visualizations pane in the Format tab. Open the Tooltip section and set the Type field to Report page and then select the Tooltip A value under the Page value.

The final result is very similar. While it’s not completely the same because the charts now behave slightly differently, it is a very similar principle.

However, at this point, the decade head start of Tableau kicks in. It pulls ahead with much more complete options for geographical visualization, including layers, rich label options and many others. Some of these options are not at all available in Power BI, which is very likely the reason that some advanced users do not want to switch to Power BI.

Small multiples

Let’s continue our Tableau vs Power BI challenge with one of our favorites: small multiples!

In Tableau

First, let’s look at the Sales by Segment chart shown on the dashboard in Tableau. This is an area chart analyzing sales and profits over time across three segments. It’s actually a bit difficult to understand at a glance and you have to hover over the chart to see what the data actually says. In this case the orange area shows the portion of the orders that were unprofitable.

This chart is repeated across three panes for each segment individually. Tableau works with rows and columns, so you can plug in additional dimensions to create small multiples.

Once you have this, you can just as easily drop the Product category dimension into the Columns placeholder to add more charts. Like this:

Tableau was probably one of the first tools to do this well and it’s really easy to make. These charts are scaled and they work well but there are some issues. Small multiples here are always equidistant so all charts are the same size regardless of whether they actually need all that space. You will start to see this as a limitation once you move to the intermediate or advanced level.

In Power BI

If you’re interested in learning more about small multiples in Power BI, here’s a full 1-hour webinar on the topic: Supercharge Your Power BI Dashboards with Small Multiples.

In Power BI, you can easily replicate the same thing. Start by enabling small multiples in the Options and settings menu. Enable the “small multiples” feature on the Preview features page. Then add an Area chart to your report and add Month, Sales and Profit dimensions.

Replicate the look by going to the Format tab in the Visualizations pane. Here, you can set up the data colors to match the overall design.

All you need to do now is to just drop the Segment dimension into the Small multiples placeholder and you have your small multiples.

Compared to Tableau, which always operates on a two-dimensional matrix, so when you have three charts, you will either have all three in a single row or all three in a single column. On the other hand, Power BI has more flexibility, giving you more options to customize your layout. For example, you can switch from the above layout with 2 rows and 2 columns to a single column view. This is particularly useful when you have a larger data set that you need to display.

Change the look by going to the Format tab in the Visualizations pane. Here, you can set up the number of rows and columns in the Grid Layout menu.

Analyzing multiple measures

In Tableau — major red flag!

Synchronizing axes

Let’s look at how we can further work on this data in Tableau. I want to look at sales and profit by quarter and categories, so I will add these measures to my worksheet.

You can make the visual more intuitive by adjusting the color of profits. which you can do by editing the SUM(Profit) Mark colors. You can make it stepped instead of a gradient, so it emphasizes important data more.

Now right-click on Profit and select Dual axis, which actually just takes the profit and overlays it over sales. You can also click on the Size button under Marks and make the profit bar slightly thinner to get a better overview of what is going on.

Obviously, you can quickly see that something’s wrong here. Profit cannot be larger than the sales. The issue is that both bars are on different axes, so you need to synchronize them by right-clicking on it and setting it.

Sales vs. Target

Now let’s look at another visual and the dirty tricks we had to do to get it. Let’s say we want to look at sales versus target because the database also includes plan data. Let’s look at the Tableau’s default behavior. Essentially, when you add a new measure, Tableau always takes up full available space. This means that when we added the sales vs. target measure, everything is way off.

The axes between the two visuals are not synchronized and we cannot just right click and turn on that option here. What people in Tableau do is they take the sales measure and put it once again here to add another chart.

Only then can you make a dual axis to join two charts.

To fix the scaling issue, you need to synchronize the axes once again and then hide the bars representing sales to emphasize the variance. This trick only works if you don’t have any negative values and you’re also left with a lot of white space that can cause trouble once you try to create a good-looking dashboard.

In Power BI

When you work with data like this, the recommended strategy is to use the Matrix visual.

You start by setting up the matrix with Category and Sub-Category measures in Rows and Quarter measure in the Column placeholder. The values shown are Profit ratio and Sales.

You can design this matrix by setting up conditional formatting to show data bars for the Profit ratio measure. You can also set up colors for positive and negative values to make this go from a boring table to a more attractive combination of visualization and data.

So while this is not a proper separate chart, it’s conditional formatting in a matrix that’s not a bad alternative to what we did in Tableau.

Data representation and modeling

This is an area, where Power BI is much stronger. While Tableau has improved over the last year with Tableau Prep, Power BI is still far ahead. While you can connect to many data sources with both tools, Power BI boasts two tools with two languages — M for Power Query and DAX for data modeling and calculations. This allows you to do anything with any kind of data source.

Power BI also brings the power of transformations to the table. If you look closely here you can even include machine learning algorithms through your clustering and other options as you load your data into your analysis.

In Power BI, you can use live connections or loaded data and even a composite model that mixes the two. When needed, you can use relationships to make your data model even more powerful.

If you’d like to learn more about data modeling in Power BI, here’s our tutorial: Top 5 Power BI DAX tricks for super effective Power BI dashboards.

Extensions

Both tools offer a way to extend their functionalities. Tableau calls them extensions and Power BI calls them custom visuals. The difference in adoption is huge right now. While Tableau has 52 extensions available, Power BI has 381.

We are talking about two completely different worlds. In Tableau, extensions are very limited and only work in dashboards and not in core Tableau. On the other hand, Microsoft is much more open and partner oriented. It has open infrastructure and APIs and marketing channels for partners. This is what drives the difference.

In Power BI, custom visuals are completely integrated into the tool. Sometimes, you can’t even tell the difference. Custom visuals can access the same data and the workflow is the same. Microsoft even certifies the best visuals out there, to make sure they meet security standards.

This gives Power BI a enormous advantage over competition. It allows it to close the gap in certain visualizations. For example, Tableau does not offer waterfall charts by default. However, you can tweak them and create small multiples with waterfall charts. On the other hand, Power BI does support waterfall charts but you cannot use them in small multiples. However, you can use a custom visual to do it. So let’s look at the end result in both tools:

Extensibility delivers true power

This extensibility means that you can do things in Power BI that you can do in Tableau but you can do so much more. You can use specialized custom visuals that do things even Tableau can’t.

For example, here is a visual where some values are much larger than other values. United States is so much larger than other countries but the distribution of these charts is not equidistant. Other countries are split in a dynamic and highly automated small multiple while still staying scaled. This is something that Tableau can’t do, even with the best tricks out there.

Or take financial statements where you need to present changes. And once you have those changes, they need to be aligned and scaled with the base values. Something like this:

This is something Tableau cannot do and Power BI can do to an extent. However, custom visuals really save the day here.

The above two visuals were created in Zebra BI and it’s super easy to add to Power BI. Simply click “Get more visuals” and select what you need from all those 318 visuals. Simply search for them in the marketplace. Zebra BI tables and charts are here along with many, many others that will help you with composition trees and many other types of visualizations, infographics and so on.

Be more flexible than ever with Power BI

Custom visuals give you a lot of flexibility. For example, you can take a chart comparing sales to the plan and add profit as another value to turn a simple chart like this …

into a more meaningful chart like this:

Let’s look at an even more extreme example — sales by state. This is a great test of the small multiples functionality, because it creates dozens of charts.

Something like this would not even be possible in Tableau. You would just see either one row or one column and the height would be the same for all of them. Here you have maybe 20 or more charts on one page. Even when you go down, as the values get smaller, the amount of space they take up is smaller.

The point here is that custom visuals add this additional power even in the spaces where maybe Tableau had years of advantage.

Tableau vs Power BI — and the winner is…

So who wins our Tableau vs Power BI Superstore challenge? Well, it depends… 🙂

While Tableau is still a force to be reckoned with in the data visualization space, Power BI is deservedly making inroads.

Try Power BI out with some custom visuals like Zebra BI and you’ll see you can really create visual stories that are meaningful, impactful and actionable.

Especially if you’re a beginner, Power BI is the more suitable choice. You will be able to start working and creating faster and with fewer difficulties.

Get follow-along PBIX example

If you’d like to try any of these features yourself, enter your data below to get immediate access to the full 1-hour video recording of the webinar and all PBIX examples used in the this tutorial: Get follow-along PBIX example

Originally published at https://zebrabi.com on March 9, 2021.

Tableau vs Power BI: which is the best dataviz software in 2021? was originally published in Zebra BI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from https://medium.com/zebra-bi/tableau-vs-power-bi-which-is-the-best-dataviz-software-in-2021-17fc0f5b15f2?source=rss—-371945c254e—4

from
https://polurizer.tumblr.com/post/645251820178063362

from https://ellalerner.blogspot.com/2021/03/tableau-vs-power-bi-which-is-best.html

from
https://onemilecloser.tumblr.com/post/645255684752130048