Visualizations are how you can take innumerable rows of data and make them meaningful. With the right combination of dimensions, measures, calculations, and sorting, you can quickly identify outliers, patterns, and trends. Visualizations of reports are sent out in subscription emails, so it's beneficial to have a good understanding to make the most of your visualizations.

It's best to discover the visualizations yourself, to find which ones best illustrate the patterns you want to follow when preparing your own visualizations.

This topic may be somewhat subjective because there is an aesthetic component to visualizations. Make changes according to your preferences.

Check out the table visualization

This is important because you can review which data is being included in your visualization:

Hide columns that you don't need

When hovering over any column title in the report builder, the options to Remove or Hide from Visualization displays: 

This way you can focus on the numbers that you want to measure. An eye icon displays on columns that are hidden from the visualization:

Break out the types of measures

Sometimes graphs need to look at multiple sets of measures to be fully meaningful. For example, Quantity, GMROI (gross market return on investment), a dollar amount, or inventory turns might be important in one of the visualizations. 

For example, if you have sold 1,000 products on Saturday for a total of $50,000, but if you measure them on the same graph, you won't be able to read the quantity:

Using the gear icon on the right-hand side of the visualization bar, you could navigate to the Y axis:

Then drag Quantity Sold down to the Right Axes section:

This way, you can measure the dollar amounts on the left-hand side of my graph, and measure the quantity amounts on the right-hand side:

Hide rows

A good way to gather sales data from different time frames is to sum their respective totals, and then show only the first line of totals in the visualization. 

If your raw data looks like this example:

Then, after hiding the columns you don't need, you can navigate to the gear icon on my visualization bar:

And then select Limit Displayed Rows:

Here, you can opt to only show the first row:

When you display the visualization as a graph, it's more meaningful.

Change the colors

On the Series tab, you can access the colors displayed on your graphs:

 Here you can choose a color from the palette, or copy and paste the color code to harmonize your data:

This makes your graphs readable as quickly as possible:

Give tables conditional formatting

If you're using a table to compare last month to this month, for example, you can use conditional formatting to respond to numeric values and to highlight negative and positive change.

Under Formatting, toggle on Enable Conditional Formatting:

Start by selecting If the Value is less than 0:

Now you can set the visual rules. In this case, if the change is less than 0, you can make the font red and bold:

Now, you can add a new rule for if the values are greater than 0:

And your table will follow the rules that you have set.

What's next?