Pragmatic Works Nerd News

Power BI Custom Visuals - Table Heatmap

Written by Devin Knight | Sep 08, 2016

In this module, you will learn how to use the Table Heatmap Power BI Custom Visual. The Table Heatmap has the look and feel of a pivot table or matrix report. However, instead of seeing traditional values in the table, you actually see colors that represent your values instead.

Module 15 – Table Heatmap

Downloads

Key Takeaways

  • In the Table Heatmap, the color of the boxes is determined by the value in your measure.
  • Only 1 category field can be used, which will dynamically generate the number of columns based on the number of distinct values your field has.
  • The number and types of colors can be changed using some of the settings we’ll discuss below.

This shows a Table Heatmap with Month as the category column and individual fields 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 in the Y axis.

  • Under the Format paintbrush there isn’t much available to customize the appearance of the Table Heatmap.
  • The one section specific to the Table Heatmap that you have available is found under the General section.
    • By changing the Colorbrewer property you are able to swap out the color palette being used
    • You can also use the Buckets setting to increase/decrease the number of colors that are used in the color palette you’ve selected.

  • There are many color palettes that you can use in the Colorbrewer property, but unfortunately they’re not well documented. Here’s a list of values that you could use in this property:
    • YlGn,
    • YlGnBu,
    • GnBu,
    • BuGn,
    • PuBuGn,
    • PuBu,
    • BuPu,
    • RdPu,
    • PuRd,
    • OrRd,
    • YlOrRd,
    • YlOrBr,
    • Purples, Blues, Greens, Oranges, Reds, Greys,
    • PuOr,
    • BrBG,
    • PRGn,
    • PiYG,
    • RdBu,
    • RdGy,
    • RdYlBu,
    • Spectral, RdYlGn,
    • Paired, Pastel1, Set1, Set2, Set
  • Experiment with these and see which makes most sense for your solution
  • In addition to these properties, you have a set of settings that appears on every visual to adjust the background color, add a border around the visual and lock the aspect ratio.

Find Out More

You will always be able to find this video module and advanced viewing of future modules on the Pragmatic Works On-Demand Training platform or view my previous blog posts.