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Use Organizational Themes (Preview) to manage your License in Nova Silva visuals

Use Organizational Themes to manage your License in Nova Silva visuals

Administrators can now use the Power BI Admin Portal to add and manage themes that are available to all users within the organization!

With the latest enhancements in Power BI Organizational themes (preview), administrators and creators can easily manage and apply themes. Use Organizational themes to automate the license activation of your Nova Silva visuals by simply adding the license details directly into a organizational theme file. This means there’s no longer a need for each report creator to manually insert license details across multiple reports.

Considerations

Organizational Themes is a Preview feature and is available only to admins.
Making an organizational theme available does not update existing reports automatically.
Theme gallery is available in both Power BI Desktop and the Service.

How do you set up an Organizational Theme?

Pre-requisites: Create a custom theme by going to View > Themes > Customize current theme, and Save current theme in Power BI Desktop. Locate and open the custom JSON file and add the Nova Silva license details in the visualStyles section and Save the file.

Add the following example to your Organizational theme file and replace the text between quotes with your own license information. License Name and License Key are provided to you directly via email. Be sure to copy them exactly as received.

"visualStyles": {
       "*": {
          "*": {
             "license": [{
                 "licenseName": "YOUR LICENSE NAME",
                 "licenseKey": "YOUR LICENSE KEY"
            }]
        }
    } 
}
  1. As an Administrator, go to the Power BI Admin Portal and click on Organizational themes (preview).
  2. Click the + Add theme button, in the Theme Settings pane upload the customized .JSON file (including your License in the visualStyles section).
  3. After adding the file, click Enable for theme gallery. This will make the organizational theme(s) available to Creators.
  4. As a Creator, go to View > Theme menu in Power BI Desktop, select the dropdown arrow and then select the theme you want under Organizational themes.
  5. Save and publish the report to the Power BI Service or
  6. In Power BI Service, go to Edit > View > Theme and select the Organizational theme.

The Nova Silva license information will then be applied consistently across all reports using that Organizational theme.

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PowerGantt Chart for Power BI – May 2025 Update

PowerGantt Chart for Power BI – May 2025 Update

We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature in our latest PowerGantt release: Custom milestone markers!

With this update, you can now add any icon to your PowerGantt visual to represent milestones—bringing even more clarity and customization to your project timelines. Whether you’re highlighting key deliverables, risks, or approval points, custom icons make it easier to tell your story briefly.

But that’s not all—these icons support conditional formatting, enabling dynamic styling based on status, category, or any field in your data. For example, you can automatically display a red warning icon for delayed tasks or a green checkmark for completed milestones.

Custom icons give you the flexibility to match your visual to your organization’s language and branding, making project tracking more intuitive and visually engaging than ever before.

Update your PowerGantt Chart today and make your project milestones stand out with style!

Try the PowerGantt Chart for FREE now on your own project data by downloading it from the AppSource.

Questions or remarks? Visit us at: https://visuals.novasilva.com/.

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Strip Plot for Power BI – April 2025 Update

Strip Plot for Power BI – April 2025 Update

The Strip Plot is an essential tool for uncovering patterns in categorical and numerical data, allowing users to visualize the distribution of individual data points effectively. With our latest update, we’ve supercharged the Strip Plot with powerful new features that enhance clarity and flexibility.

What’s new?

  • Jittering – Say goodbye to overlapping points! Jittering slightly shifts data points to improve visibility, ensuring that every value in your dataset is accounted for.
  • Box plot – Combine summary statistics with raw data by overlaying a box plot on your strip plot. Now, you can easily spot medians, quartiles, and outliers while maintaining full visibility of individual data points.
  • Vertical layout – Previously limited to horizontal orientation, the Strip Plot now supports a vertical layout, making it even more versatile for different analytical needs.

These enhancements empower users to gain deeper insights from their data, making trend identification and anomaly detection easier than ever. Try the updated Strip Plot in Power BI today and take your visual analytics to the next level! Download it now from the AppSource.

Questions or remarks? Visit us at: https://visuals.novasilva.com/.

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Attribute Control Chart for Power BI – March 2025 Update

Attribute Control Chart for Power BI – March 2025 Update

Earlier this year, Nova Silva introduced the Attribute Control Chart for Power BI, designed to empower users with advanced quality control insights. Initially, it supported the foundational attribute chart types, including the c chart, u chart, Laney u chart, p chart, Laney p chart, and np chart.

A diagram of a company Description automatically generated

Now, we’re excited to announce expanded capabilities with support for Rare Event Control Charts — specifically, the T chart and G chart. These charts are essential for monitoring events that occur infrequently, allowing for more nuanced control in scenarios where traditional control charts may not be sensitive enough. The T chart helps monitor the time between rare events, while the G chart tracks the count of opportunities between events. These new additions make the Attribute Control Chart even more versatile, enabling organizations to gain insights into low-frequency incidents, which are often critical yet challenging to monitor.

By expanding Power BI’s Attribute Control Chart functionality, we continue to support diverse business needs, helping teams identify issues promptly and maintain high-quality standards across all processes.

Ready to experience the Attribute Control Chart? Download it from AppSource today and explore its capabilities with your own data – try for free!

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Lollipop Bar Chart for Power BI – November 2024 Update

Lollipop Bar Chart for Power BI – November 2024 Update

We’re thrilled to continue receiving your valuable feedback, and we appreciate your contributions in helping us improve our visuals.

In our latest Lollipop Bar Chart release for Power BI, we’ve added a much-requested feature: secondary markers. This allows you to display not only the primary value but also add context by including a secondary value marker.

A screenshot of a graph Description automatically generated

This new feature integrates seamlessly with all other Lollipop Bar Chart functionalities, such as transforming the Lollipop Bar Chart into a dot plot by removing the connecting bars, as shown in the second image. This also removes the requirement to start your numeric scale at 0, allowing you to have a closer look at the values and their differences.

While standard bar charts are great for comparing a single measure across categories, they can become cluttered with larger datasets (>10 categories). The colored bars may fill too much of the chart space. To address this, the Lollipop Bar Chart offers a cleaner, more efficient alternative, minimizing clutter without sacrificing clarity.

Try the Lollipop Bar Chart for FREE now on your own data by downloading it from the AppSource.

Questions or remarks? Visit us at: https://visuals.novasilva.com/.

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Cycle Plot for Power BI – October 2024 Update

Cycle Plot for Power BI – October 2024 Update

A cycle plot is a powerful tool for visualizing and understanding seasonal patterns in time series data. Unlike traditional line graphs, which may obscure cyclical trends, cycle plots separate data into cycles (e.g., months, days, or quarters) and plot them individually for each period within a cycle.

This method highlights within-cycle variations and trends across cycles. For example, a cycle plot of monthly sales over several years would display each month’s trend over time, making it easier to identify whether certain months consistently perform better or worse. It also reveals how overall trends (like yearly growth) affect individual periods.

Cycle plots are particularly useful for businesses and analysts who need to identify seasonality in sales, website traffic, or other metrics. By visualizing data this way, decision-makers can better plan for seasonal peaks and troughs, optimize inventory, and tailor marketing efforts.

In summary, cycle plots offer a clearer and more detailed perspective on time series data, making them an essential tool for uncovering and leveraging seasonal patterns.

Try the Cycle Plot for FREE now on your own data by downloading it from the AppSource.

Questions or remarks? Visit us at: https://visuals.novasilva.com/.

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Attribute Control Chart for Power BI

Maintaining quality standards is a non-negotiable aspect of every successful operation. Enter the new Attribute Control Chart for Power BI, a robust mechanism for monitoring and controlling categorical data variations.

The Attribute Control Chart offers a comprehensive suite of six attribute charts to cater to diverse analytical needs:

  • c chart: Monitors number of defects per sample (sample size is constant).
  • u chart: Tracks the number of defects per unit (sample size varies).
  • Laney u’ chart: A modified version of the u chart to adjust for overdispersion or underdispersion in your data.
  • p chart: Observes the proportion of defective items per sample (sample size varies).
  • Laney p’ chart: A modified version of the p chart to adjust for overdispersion or underdispersion in your data.
  • np chart: Displays the count of defective items per sample (sample size is constant).

Power BI users can delve deeper into their data, facilitating timely decision-making and continuous improvement. From manufacturing to healthcare, the Attribute Control Chart equips organizations across industries with the insights needed to uphold quality standards and drive operational excellence.

Ready to experience the Attribute Control Chart? Download it from AppSource today and explore its capabilities with your own data – try for free!

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Custom sort orders in Power BI

Custom sort orders in Power BI

Ah, the smell of coffee and nicely sorted charts in the morning is something everyone can enjoy. Sorting your data in Power BI is easy at first sight but it doesn’t always give you the results you first expect, especially with ordinal data. In this post, we zoom into sorting and some of its caveats.

Power BI offers some readily available functionality to sort your charts ad hoc. Simply select the More Options icon in your chart, go to Sort by and select the field on which you want to sort. Easy!

Fig. 1: Sort your graphs via the Sort by option. Here you will also find options to sort ascending or descending.

This works fine for sorting values numerically or alphabetically, such as for nominal values. Things get a little bit trickier when you are working with ordinal values such as the day of the week. By just sorting your chart on the day of the week, you will end up with Friday, Monday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

Nominal data: data in which the variables have no natural order. Examples are binary data (true / false) or names (Dustin, Will, Lucas, Johnathan).

Ordinal data: data in which the variables have natural, ordered categories. Examples include Months (Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.) or questionnaire scores (poor, reasonable, good, or excellent).

Fig. 2: The left column chart has the Weekday names in the Axis bucket, while the right one has Weekday number on the Axis.

As an alternative you can replace the names of the weekdays with the weekday numbers. Creating such a column can be done in your workbook using the following DAX function:

Day of Week Number = WEEKDAY(Date[Date],2)

Mondays are now the first day of the week, the standard in most European countries. Change the last argument of the WEEKDAY function to have Sunday or Saturday as the start of the week. Updating your chart with this newly created column allows you to show the days in the correct order. However, we’ve now lost our labels.

Using Sort by Column

We can fix this problem by sorting our column, based on another column. We therefore must indicate on which column to sort our data. In the Report view in Power BI Desktop, select the column you want sorted. Next, go to Column tools and find the “Sort by column” options. Select the column containing the correct order, and that’s it. (Note: this option is also available in the Data and Model view, it works exactly the same way)

Fig. 3: After selecting your column in the Fields pane, you will see the Column tools tab appear in the Ribbon.

This sort order is used in all visuals whether it’s a bar chart, table or slicer. You may run into visuals that overrule sorting of the data, so keep that in mind when working with some custom visuals.

Fig. 4: The chart has been sorted in the way we want it: it shows the names of the day in chronological order

You can do this trick on any column in your data, even if you’ve created that column yourself using DAX. Do make sure that every value in the column you want sorted, has only 1 corresponding value on which to sort. Power BI will not be able to sort your weekdays if Monday sometimes has number 1 and other times number 2. In other words, both columns must have the same cardinality.

Fig. 5: Make sure that the column on which you base you sorting has the same cardinality as the column to be sorted, or Power BI will not be able to figure the correct order out!

In order to use Sort by Column, both columns must be in the same table. If you have two tables with a relationship between them, it will not be possible to sort a column based on a column in the other table. You would have to merge the two tables to resolve this. Remember to only keep relevant columns after merging as your table size can grow substantially, degrading performance.

Fig. 6: Unfortunately, we can’t perform the sorting based on column from other tables.

Side effects on calculations

Unwanted side effects can occur when using DAX expressions on columns that are being sorted by another column. What makes matters worse is that there is not easy way to see which columns are being sorted on others. Take the following example: we want to calculate the percentage of the total sales for each month. We can do this by creating the following measure:

Monthly % of Year= 
DIVIDE (SUM(Sales[Sales]),
        CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Sales]),
        ALL(Sales[Month Name])))

In the two tables below, we see what happens to our result as soon as we sort the Month Name column on the Month Number:

Fig. 7: Left: The Month Name column is sorted on itself. We see that our DAX statement correctly calculates the fraction of yearly sales that happened that month. Right: After sorting the Month Name by the Month Number, our DAX statement divides the monthly sales by itself. Surely this is not what we wanted!

All of our fractions are 100% after using Sort by Column! This happens because the SUMMARIZECOLUMNS function groups the data using both the Month Name and Month Number column. We must therefore make sure to clear both involved columns using the ALL function in our measurement.

Monthly % of Year= 
DIVIDE (SUM(Sales[Sales]),
        CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Sales]),
        ALL(Sales[Month Name],Sales[Month Number])))

The table below show the results that we expected. The monthly sales are now correctly divided by the total sales of the year.

Fig. 8: By making sure that both column filters are cleared in our DAX statement, we now have the expected results

In short: sorting categories in a chart numerically or alphabetically can quickly be done using the More Options menu in your visual. Sorting a column based on another one is done using the Sort by Column option but both columns must have the same cardinality. Finally, keep in mind that your measures may show unexpected behaviour when you’ve sorted on another column.

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The Strip Plot

Every month Microsoft publishes a summary of all the new features in Power BI within their Power BI Blog. In the december 2020 post we got the opportunity to introduce our Strip Plot to the Power BI community. Here you have our contribution to the Power BI Blog.

Most charts will force you to summarize or categorize data before it is displayed. This can hide important details and may be misleading. The Strip Plot shows all your data observations in one go without hiding important details. It shows each data point on a single continuous scale.

The example above illustrates this by showing the number of reported COVID-19 cases per continent (on September 1st, 2020). The bar chart shows the average per continent, where the Strip Plot shows the cases per individual country. In the Strip Plot it becomes obvious the relative high number in Oceania are caused by just two countries (outliers), where the bar chart only shows a very high average. It’s these kinds of details that become visible in the Strip Plot.

Furthermore, the Strip Plot supports all standard Power BI functionality like drilling, selection & highlighting, context menu and full tooltip support. All this functionality is available through the standard Power BI interface, so no need to learn any new interface.

Don’t hesitate and try the Strip Plot now on your own data by downloading it from the AppSource.