This Interactive Power BI Checklist Will 10x Your Company's Report Quality
Build an all-in-one education resource with videos, text & images.
Creating a Power BI report from start to finish can be a daunting task.
Without a structured process, it can be difficult to know what factors to consider, what actions to take, and where to click to produce a high-quality report. This holds true especially if you’re lucky to be working in an organization where business users are empowered to create their own reports.
Fortunately, any skill can be taught if you break down the process into simple enough steps. This is exactly what the Report Creator Checklist does 👇
Finding the optimal training method
Let me first explain what led me to create this checklist report.
I’ve tried many traditional training methods over the past years, and they all have some pros and cons:
1-1 coaching — The most effective & targeted way to teach someone, but a nightmare😱 in terms of time required. Not scalable with a lot of people.
Group training — Less time intensive than 1-1 training, but harder to target as the skill level in the group will always vary. Also, it’s impossible to find a time that works for everyone. And let’s not forget that people easily forget what was taught in a one-time training.
Video training — Highly reusable and people can check it when it best fits them as many times it requires. But it might be hard to find what you need from a long video. What’s more, videos can easily go obsolete and it’s a pain to update them. Not ideal for technical topics such as Power BI that are continuously evolving.
So, what makes a good a good education resource then?
Reusable — Doesn’t require much time after initial heavy lifting.
Updateable — Easy to keep up to date.
Available — Available when the user needs it.
Searchable — Quickly find what you need.
All-in-one — No jumping between multiple resources.
But is it realistic to create something like this? You bet it is!
Time to dive into the nuts and bolts🔩 of the checklist!
The solution that checks all the boxes
I believe help should be located close to where you need it.
For that reason, I built this solution using Power BI Desktop. Power BI help in Power BI, makes sense right?
The canvas has been split into nine numbered categories with six detail level items in each. This makes it easy for the end user to form a picture of the overall process, but also to quickly locate any individual item. Each item comes with a checkbox✅ you can use to keep track what you’ve already done. It’s also easy to maintain as it doesn’t take too much time to update an individual checklist item.
You might be wondering how the individual elements have been created?
Checkboxes
The checkboxes have been created using a slicer visual.
Since there is no real need to filter anything in this solution, all of the checkboxes can be connected to the same dummy column which is created using the Enter data feature in Power Query.
The content of this column says “Mark done” because it can be then displayed as the tooltip text when hovering mouse over the checkbox.
Text
The short text descriptions visible on the page are built using the new card visual.
Why not use just a simple text box? Because text boxes don’t support the use of tooltips, which I will explain in a minute.
To get data into each card visual, we need to add another table that contains all the descriptions. This table is also created using the Enter data feature.
Visual level filters in the ID column can be then used to display the correct description in each card.
However, there's more to this than what first meets the eye👁️.
Since the space is very limited for explaining each checklist item in detail, we also need a longer description. These can be added using the help tooltip feature.
A minor annoyance in doing this is that you have to add line breaks to the help tooltip box using a proper empty character (get it from this website). Using Enter to create new rows won’t be enough.
Hopefully Microsoft fixes this bug soon…
To make typing of the help tooltips easier, I usually expand the input box by dragging down from the bottom right corner.
Images & Videos
Now… To the crown jewel👑💎 of this solution, dynamic help videos!
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video has to be worth at least 10K words. Using the tooltip feature, it’s possible to automatically display a GIF whenever you place your mouse over any of the items.
Check out the below video to better understand it:
By using short instruction videos, even an absolute beginner can follow the steps and see where you need to click around to create quality output.
To implement this, I’ve created a hidden tooltip page for each of the checklist items. While this means there are total 55 pages in the pbix file, it’s not an issue since the page names are short and logical (for page example 3.4 = Category 3, Checklist item 4)
To get this working properly, you cannot use video files. Instead, you have to add a GIF as the canvas background. I’ve found that using the image fit = Fill accompanied with a custom Height and Width works the best. It might require bit of testing.
In the Report Creator Checklist page, the only thing you have to do is to connect the right tooltip page with the right card visual. This has been already done in the example pbix you can get with the link you receive(d) via email when subscribing.
If you don’t need a tooltip for some of the cards, simply toggle off the tooltip.
Note: I’ve removed most of the videos & help tooltip texts from the example pbix as many of them we’re company specific.
Besides videos, you could also add images as the tooltip.
In the end, it’s a matter of personal preference which one you decide to use.
To create the help GIFs and images with numbered steps and arrows, you probably need to install some third-party application. Personally, I use Snagit, but I’m sure there’s plenty of other tools as well that get the job done.
Finally, for this report, the filter pane can be completely hidden before you publish the report to be shared with others.
Using the selection pane
You might have noticed that categories 1 & 2 are missing a few checklist items compared to other categories.
If you don't need all six checklist items in some of the categories, it's super easy to simply hide not needed items using the selection pane. Every item in the selection pane has been logically named and also grouped together by category.
In here, it’s also possible to set the layer & tab order.
Using personal bookmarks
After publishing to Power BI service, there’s one handy feature I’d like to mention: personal bookmarks.
It’s not uncommon for somebody to have multiple reports under development at the same time🤹. It might be tricky however to keep track of where you are in the development process for each report.
Personal bookmarks provide you with the possibility to quickly return where you left the last time you worked on a new report.
Performance considerations
The only bad side of this solution is that clicking on a checkbox is rather slow🐢.
This is because there are quite a few visualizations on the same page and all of them automatically reload whenever you click on any of the checkboxes. Toggling interactions between visual off doesn’t help either…
But… If speed is your number 1 priority and you’re willing to sacrifice the possibility to use personal bookmarks, there is a way to make the whole report lightning fast⚡. That happens by adding Apply all slicers button from the Optimize menu.
Then simply hide this button from the end users.
Farewell 👋
That was all for today!
Let me know in the comments if you've already built something similar, or if this is the first time you've stumbled on an educational report built with Power BI!
Thanks for tuning in! More exciting things to come in future posts! 🚀
Hello Lasse,
I am subscribed but I still cannot see the link to the PBIX file.
What I see in the middle of the text is:
Subscribe to access the pbix used in this post!
Subscribed
But still not file to be found. Can you indicate where it is?
I also didn't get anything on my email - I checked SPAM as well.
Thanks in advance :)
Hi can you please provide access to the Pbix File.
Thank you