Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data. By utilizing visual elements like charts, graphs, maps, etc., data visualization tools provide an accessible way to observe and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data. As Ben Schneiderman correctly said:
Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.
While creating data visualizations for your organization to make data-driven decisions, it is all the more important to come up with charts and graphs that put the word across in simple yet meaningful ways. Thus, developing a more viewer-friendly visual will help one go a long way to create an impact.
This blog is hence created in order to guide one-and-all to develop such insightful charts. In this blog, the problem statement for creating the chart is to compare the revenue of the Top 5 companies listed on the Fortune 500 site for the year 2022. The screenshot of which is shown below:
Now, let us move on to the steps for creating an insightful chart that showcases the revenue for these Top 5 companies:
- Let us assume first that you have this data with you as a CSV file. Next, open the PowerBI platform and open a new project. Click on ‘Get Data’ as shown in the screenshot below and choose ‘Text/CSV’:
2. As you choose this, go to your folder that contains the data in a CSV format and import the data. Upon importing, the screen will show up with the selected CSV filename as mentioned above on the image below:
3. Load the data and the data will show up on the ‘Fields’ section on the right side of Power BI
4. Now, go to the ‘Visualizations’ section and click on the 3 dots ‘…’ to get more visuals
5. From the options, choose ‘Get more visuals’ to go open up the PowerBI visuals (with all the options of visualizations and charts to choose from).
(Note that the ‘Get more visuals’ option opens up only if one is logged in to PowerBI using an organizational account.)
6. After the PowerBI visuals open up, go ahead and choose the ‘Infographic Designer’ from Microsoft Corporation in order to move ahead.
7. Click on this in order to open the info and click ‘Add’.
8. Now this visualization will get added to your set of basic visualizations that PowerBI provides in their original set.
9. Next, click on this ‘Infographic Designer 1.8.9’ icon to load an empty chart into the PowerBI page.
10. Download pictures of the company logos based on the company names in your data (For instance, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, CSV Health and UnitedHealth Group in case of my data).
I’d recommend using the logo pictures without background in order for the graph chart to look better. If there is a logo image with a background, then you can remove it using the Background Remover site.
Or use any other tool of your choice.
11. Next up, add data to your empty Infographic Designer chart visual. In my case, I am adding the ‘Top 5 Companies’ column of my data to Category and ‘Revenue (in M)’ column data to Measure. This will create a visual as shown below:
12. Now go ahead and click the pencil icon to edit this visual.
13. This will open up the editing window for this visual. Go ahead to the image icon right next to the layer info named ‘shape01’ and upload all the logo images without the background, as in the pictures shown below.
14. Now click on one of them, which will make it look like the picture shown below. If the picture does not show up then change the layers on the side of the layer info to adjust the layer order properly. Click on the Data Binding option for the next step.
15. Next, enable the data binding option by changing ‘None’ to the column you want to embed separate logo pictures for. In my case, I’ll choose the column ‘Top 5 Companies’ for my data binding for different logo images.
16. Select the different logo images for each of the top 5 companies
and then click ‘Apply’.
17. After applying, the chart will look like the picture below.
18. Next, to adjust the images in the bar charts, go back from the Data Binding section and toggle the Keep Ratio from ‘off’ to ‘on’ as shown here:
19. Now let us go back to ‘shape01’ back in the layout layer for the bar charts and click on settings and then choose ‘custom’ to change the color of the bars for the icons to be seen properly.
20. The final resultant chart hence looks like this:
I hope this guide to creating this wonderful chart helped you develop meaningful visualizations along with embedded company logos.
We can also use this approach in order to create charts to compare the popularity of different programming languages, the population of different countries along with their flags, etc.
Please applaud this story so that this reaches curious data viz. creators like you and help me build more data-related content for you all. Have a good day!
