15 Mar How to use KPI Visuals in Power BI

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a visual cue that communicates the amount of progress made toward a measurable goal or shows how effectively you’re meeting your goals. KPI visual is a functional and effective visualization in Power BI.

KPI Elements in Power BI

Key Performance Indicators can be broken into three parts; Base value, Target value, and Status thresholds.

• Base value: a base value is a calculated field that usually results in a value or result, for example, it can be an aggregate of profit or sales for a specific period of time.
• Target value: The target value is a measure which is the goal all the rows should achieve. E.g. Sales target for all the salespersons. For instance, we can set a target value for entire units to be sold in a month as 500. Now, our base value will be the recorded value for a month. It can be less than 500, equal to 500, or greater than 500.
• Status thresholds: The status thresholds provide a rank to evaluate the base value and target values. The visual also presents a high and low threshold between which the base and target values fall to help users determine the status of the base value to the target value.

Note: A KPI dataset also needs to contain goal values for a KPI. If your dataset doesn’t contain goal values, you can create them by adding an Excel sheet with goals to your data model or PBIX file

After you’ve selected the KPI visual, three blank spaces are present in the Fields section; Indicator, Trend axis, and Target measure.

We will go back to the Fields pane and find out all our data has been brought in. Select the field values (from table TotalSalesThisYear) and put them into the Indicator column. Then we will put the field FiscalMonth in the Trend axis column and the Goals field into the Target measure column. From the image below, this represents a sample KPI we’ll generate.

We’ll go further to format the KPI by selecting the paint roller icon i.e. the Format section. Under here we can set the properties of our indicator, goal, trend axis, etc.

After we’re done formatting the KPI to our desired output, we’ll generate a sample KPI that looks like what we have in the image below.

KPI Custom Visualizations

The KPI we created now is known as the Built-in KPI which comes with our Power BI Desktop. In addition to this built-in KPI, we have several other KPI-related visualizations that we can download from the Power BI Marketplace.

To add custom KPI visualizations from the marketplace, we click on From Marketplace icon.

From the Power BI Visuals dialog box, we have all the different types of available add-in visualizations to use. To view these related visuals, go to KPIs option and select from the list of visuals like Bullet Chart, Dual KPI, Power KPI, etc.

KPI best practices

There are different KPI best practices that we can observe to help us explore more on KPI usage. These tips are;

• You must only pick KPIs that are aligned to your specific goals. If your objectives aren’t clear, matching KPIs against them will prove complicated.
• Ensure you use different KPIs for the same goals if they stretch across groups.
• Ensure that whatever KPI you selected, there’s a core team responsible for defining them.