2021 Week 48 | Power BI: Create a Waffle Chart

Introduction

This week we are continuing our design theme and using the waffle chart custom visual.

Waffle charts show progress toward a whole or a target percentage, and can be used as an alternative to bar and/or pie charts. The Waffle Chart custom visual in Power BI allows us to customize the icon (here we used a square) and the data colors.

Have fun with this week’s challenge and don’t forget to fill out the participant tracker when you’re done!

Requirements

Connect to the Superstore Dataset in Data.World
- In this challenge we’re only using the Orders data – but it’s a great practice to build out your star schema and add a date table if you’d like to use this for more practice!
Create a measure to calculate the % of Grand Total Sales that each Sector contributes
- hint: check out the Waffle Chart custom viz documentation because the percent doesn’t perform exactly as you would expect
Add an svg path to change the shape of your waffles (the default is a circle)
- find an svg of your choosing online
- use the online converter to change the image to a path
- add a table with one row containing the path in your Power BI Desktop report
Add a slicer – I used the chiclet slicer custom visual for a bit more customization
Add a text box/smart narrative visual to create the narrative
- I created a measure prior to using the smart narrative to concatenate the selected values in the slicer

Dataset

This week we are building off the Tableau Superstore dataset. Use the Data.World connector in Power BI with the owner rodyzakovich, dataset workout-wednesday-2018-week-2.

Reminder, you do need a Data.World subscription to connect to this data. Sign up for free!

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtags #WOW2021 and #PowerBI, and tag @JSBaucke, @MMarie, and @shan_gsd. Also make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year.

Solution

Watch

4 thoughts on “2021 Week 48 | Power BI: Create a Waffle Chart”

Michał Niewiadomski
April 15, 2022 at 7:37 am

Hi,
If we use DAX we can prepear this visualization without downloading visualization from shop. Addition if we connect waffle chart with Unichar function we can prepear more personalizated visualization.

1. Shannon Lindsay
  May 3, 2022 at 10:38 pm
  
  Hi Michal – there is no way to create a waffle chart visualization without using some kind of a custom visual. I welcome anyone out here to correct me if I’m wrong!
  
  1. Michał Niewiadomski
    September 7, 2022 at 7:31 am
    
    Hi,
    Sorry I didn’t see your reply :(. I did the Waffle Chart webinar a few months ago (webinar is in my native language, but DAX of course is universal). Link below. DAX solution starts in 18 minutes.
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsMTQ4f9Fps
    
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