Hierarchical Bar Chart



In this article

OVERVIEW

Hierarchical bar chart is a Power BI Custom Visual which displays hierarchical data (different fields having parent/child relationship) in the form a bar/column chart with +/- signs to view/hide details or child elements.

This visual has following key features

It is a free Custom Visual but with certain premium features requiring additional purchase.

This short video gives an overview of this visual’s features.

HOW TO USE THIS VISUAL / KEY FEATURES

This visual needs at least one field in the “Category Data” segment and one field in the “Measure Data” of the fields pane.

You can use a maximum of 4 fields in the Category Data.

Take text fields having parent/child relationship (for example Continents|Countries|Cities or Years|HalfYears|Quarters|Months) and drag them to the Category Data .

Drag the Measure or numeric field to Measure Data

Download the pbix file to see sample use cases


Following are the key features of this visual

1) VARIANCE BETWEEN BARS

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You can show variance between any two bars by clicking them one after another. To remove the variance , double click the variance circle.

You can define colors for positive and negative variances from the formatting pane>>Variance Colors

Now you can add CAGR between the bars as well. Just turn on CAGR from the format pane and click the bars one after another to add CAGR. This is depicted in short video below

2) Collapse/Expand bars using +/- signs at the bottom of chart to view /hide details

3) Drag the bars to sort them as you like

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You can drag the bars to perform a custom sorting. This can be very useful in some cases for example visualizing “Income Statement” items which do not follow an alphabetic order.

On each drag, 2 bars switch their position. So if the first bar is dragged to last bar, the last bar will become the first bar and vice versa.

The visual remembers your custom sorting even if you close the pbix file or switch between pages.

To turn off the custom sorting and switch to default sorting just the press “refresh button’ at the top right of visual.

4) Click on legends to drill down/up to any level in the hierarchy

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When you drill down or up, the VISUAL still remembers your settings such as “Variances you created” and “expand/collapse” status of the bars

5) Show Targets

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You can color the difference between Measure and Target from formatting pane>>Data Colors

FORMATTING OPTIONS

1 ) X-Axis Formatting

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How to change the font size and color of category labels and color of (+/-) signs

Min Bar Width and Max bar width respectively ensure that bar width is not too thin when there are many data points/bars and that bar is not too wide when there are only few bars to show for example try filtering above visual to shown only 1 or 2 bars.

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2) Secondary Labels Formatting

When you drill down to any lower level, that data bars are grouped by each of the previous level’s name. The image below shows level2 “HalfYears” of the hierarchy Grouped by Level1 “Years”

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3) Data Colors

You can change the Color of the bars at each level. Color is reflected in the bars, legends, secondary labels.

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4) Variance Colors

You can change the variance oval background and font color etc. as shown below

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5) Drill Up-Down

You can format the legends (which can be used to drill down/up to any particular level) using this segment in the property pane

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6) Plot Area

Plot area can be used to add/ reduce space at the top and left side of bars for showing variances and y-axis respectively

Other formatting options are

7) Y-Axis
8) Data Labels
9) Targets

DOWNLOAD

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You can download this custom visual from Microsoft’s AppSource.
Click here to download sample pbix file

PURCHASE

To use the visuals without Watermark in Power BI Online, please purchase the Visuals’ license for a 1 year period. License key will be sent to your email ID.

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