Making the important numbers stand out

With so much information available today, many people are simply overwhelmed by the data. This is important for us to remember when we are designing reports and visualizations. We need to help our users understand the story we are telling and one way to do this is to draw their attention to the important information. The eyes go directly to change and difference, so conditional formatting is a great way to make data stand out. However conditional formatting in Power BI can produce some pretty ugly results. In this article, I am going to show some tips to help use conditional formatting to focus on key numbers of the report. I will start with a simple matrix report that shows the monthly and yearly sales growth by brand. In this case we only have 10 brands, but you will notice nothing really jumps out to you. As a consumer of this report you must read through each row. So let’s go to the format tab on the visualization pane and turn on conditional formatting.