Formatting for Impact

Here we will modify the look of some visuals to make them more effective. The Format pane has rich options specific to the visual you are working with.

  1. Start by adding a new report page

  2. Select the Card visual from the VISUALIZATIONS pane and then tick the Total Including Tax field in the Order Details table in the field list. This will create a simple card like this:
    Card

  3. With the card visual selected on the canvas, click on the paint roller icon.
    Roller
    Note all of the formatting options available for this visual type. Format Pane

  4. Let’s change the look to make it pop!

    • Start by turning off the Category label

    • Now turn on the Title and add your new title: Total Sales including Tax

    • Change the title Font color to dark grey

    • And change the title Alignment to Centre
      Card Format

    • Change the Text size (just below the Alignment option) to 15pt

    • Nice! Re-size it a bit by dragging the corner handles. It should now look something like this.. Formatted Card

  5. Keep the visual selected and with the Format pane open,

    • Turn on the Border

    • Make the border a light grey and make the Radius 10px

    • Now turn on the Shadow
      Formatted Card 1

    • Turn on the Background option - (just below the Title option)

  6. Now left click outside the visual on the report page canvas and re-select the format pane by clicking on the paint roller again

    • This shows the formatting options for the Page ie: the background

    • Select the Page background option and click the Color dropdown
      Background

    • Select Custom color and type “ececec” into the box beside the # symbol and hit Enter. Decrease the Transparency to 0%
      Background 1

    • Now your card really jumps out! It should look something like this..
      Background 2

  7. Next we will add a column chart to our page. Be sure to de-select your card visual by clicking somewhere on the blank canvas.

    • Click on the Clustered column chart icon in the VIZUALIZATIONS pane
      Clustered Column

    • Re-size the visual to occupy most of the canvas below the Card visual you previously created

    • Just as we did before, tick the Total Including Tax field in the Order Details table in the field list to add this to the Values in the column chart

    • Now select the Sales Territory field from the Cities table to make this the Axis

    • Your chart should look something like this..
      Column Chart

    • With your column chart selected, click on the paint roller again to work with the Format pane option for this chart

    • Let’s start with the Data colors and change to a softer blue colour
      Data Colour

    • Turn on Data labels and set the Text size to 15pt

    • Now scroll back up the Format Pane and click to drop-down the X axis options, changing the Text size here to 12pt
      X Axis

    • Now that we have really clear value labels for each column, let’s turn off the Y axis as it’s not really doing much!

    • The Title of our column chart looks ok, but let’s change the Font color to dark grey and increase the Text size to 15pt
      Chart Title Text

    • Finally, turn on the default white Background and add a white Border, with a Radius of 10px
      Backgound and Border

    • It should look something like this..
      Formatted Page

This just an example of the things you can do with formatting to make your report pages more impactful.