Power BI provides powerful ways to visualize data and continuously improve the way in which we can interact with data. A new feature added to the fields list is Power BI Small Multiples. This feature is a new way in which the user can view different dimensions through multiple visuals of the dimension. Let’s start off with how we are currently using filters and slicers to view our data by different dimension or criteria and then see how small multiples can improve the reporting.

The current way

We have a dataset where we want to have a better idea of how our different product sales are doing by country and year. We simply use a bar chart as below to view our product sales per country.

This gives a good representation of our product sales per year. We get an idea of how the product sales are doing per country. We would like to have visuals where we can see the sales for each product per country on its own chart. This can be done by creating four visuals where we have a visual for each product and filer each specific visual to represent a country, but this is time consuming and not very versatile. This is where Power BI Small Multiples becomes very handy.

Power BI Small Multiples

Let’s add our products dimension that is currently being used as the legend in our current views as the small multiple.

The result will be as below. We see that for each product we have a visual and each visual is broken down into each region which represents the countries where our products is sold. This gives a much better picture of how each product is doing in each country. It also gives more flexibility in the way in which data may be presented.

The drill through functionality remains the same when you use the small multiples feature. Let’s filter by the year 2020.

If the above way of looking at your data makes it hard to compare sales by year , small multiple can accommodate multiple dimensions. There is one more thing that we need to change before adding the sales year to our dimension in order to get a better view of our sales per year per product.

 

When adding the sales of the last 3 years we will have 12 visuals to display, 3 years times 4 products. The small multiples visual accommodates a 2×2 grid. We can, however, go and change the size of our grid, let’s change it to a 3×4 grid.

Now let’s add the sales year to our dimension:

The result is below.  We have a visual for each product and each year.

 

Small multiples gives us another option in which we can display data in order to bring more insights that is easy to understand. That is it for today and we hope that this empowers you to continually seek new ways in which you can use Power BI. For more Power BI updates visit the following link.

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