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Annotating visualizations!

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Joseph Damiani on 02 Dec 2015 04:45:26

The ability to annotate a visualization, for example a chart or graph, would make both the dashboard and reports experience more robust.

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Edward Jaszi on 05 Jul 2020 23:51:04

RE: Annotating visualizations!

David has described the need well, and I agree the Tableau annotation features are a good model. The "Enlighten Data Story" custom visual (in PowerBI marketplace) provides some of the features (combining static text and measures), but the need is to have something like this embedded in other visuals and linked to data points with relative positioning.

Would you recommend starting a new thread, since the original poster didn't provide any detail?

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Alexis Wellavize on 05 Jul 2020 23:49:31

RE: Annotating visualizations!

'+1

- Ability for users to click any report visualisation, and add a free text annotation
- Ability for annotation to display as either tooltips (absolute position) or overlay
- Ability for users to toggle visibility of overlays/tooltips on/off
- Write-back capability to capture metadata - e.g. user making comment, date/time of annotation, selected filters, selected report/page, etc.

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Michael Karlesky on 05 Jul 2020 23:47:48

RE: Annotating visualizations!

Grafana has good annotation support. We would love something similar in Power BI.

To be clear, by annotations I am referring to adding time markers or time ranges (start + end timestamp) overlaid on visualizations having time on the x axis. These time markers include text that explain what happened at that moment in time.

In Grafana these are persistent vertical lines (with translucency between lines for ranges) that can selectively toggled. Clicking on an annotation marker displays a small popup with a specific timestamp, a title, and a description. Crucially, these can be populated by queries of event data. Something similar in Power BI beyond tooltips would be of great use.

https://grafana.com/docs/reference/annotations/

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Dávid Bessenyei on 05 Jul 2020 23:38:20

RE: Annotating visualizations!


Annotations are just as important as the charts.
Using Power BI for data storytelling without annotations is very limited currently.

I would like to annotate charts and data points. This function should support relative positioning (e.g. relative to selected data point or visual element like an axis or shape).
I would like to use static text and dax measures as well within one annotation.

Data point annotation would be useful to highlight what is important and to provide context.
I would use chart annotations for onboarding by explaining what the chart shows. I would use bookmarks to let the user hide the annotations when not needed.

It could be a report page tooltip that is always visible for a given data point (not just when hovered).

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Spencer Tabbert on 05 Jul 2020 23:36:49

RE: Annotating visualizations!

Agree, would love to see annotations and the ability to create a dialogue by users around certain data points. Ability to highlight, draw circles, specific filter criteria, etc

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Cathleen F. Crowley on 05 Jul 2020 23:36:38

RE: Annotating visualizations!

Please add an annotation feature to Power BI. Annotations help viewers quickly understand main points in a chart. This is particularly powerful in dashboards that are made public. Here is an example of a Tableau chart with an annotation. https://public.tableau.com/profile/ccrowley#!/vizhome/Gasprices2000-2018forNewYork/Dashboard1

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Cathleen F. Crowley on 05 Jul 2020 23:36:37

RE: Annotating visualizations!

Annotations help viewers quickly understand main points in a chart. Here is an example of a Tableau chart with an annotation. https://public.tableau.com/profile/ccrowley#!/vizhome/Gasprices2000-2018forNewYork/Dashboard1

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Steve Powel on 05 Jul 2020 23:21:37

RE: Annotating visualizations!

The ability to add annotations/narratives to visuals when certain slicer sets are selected or levels are shown on the visual as part of bookmarks or as part of user interactions would be very useful. An example would be looking at sales across the year and noting an uptick in the 3rd quarter, when you drill into the third quarter noting that the uptick was because of a new product category and this has to be stripped out to see the underlying trends. The ability to then add annotations when regions are added or drilled into to reflect which regions were impacted by internal business outages for example. Having these narratives added to bookmarks would enable more effective storytelling and would also make them easier to discover and reproduce (users tend to find something then want to go discuss it with someone so need to find it again) some method of displaying these on screen is of course critical.

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Sébastien De Bosscher on 05 Jul 2020 23:21:12

RE: Annotating visualizations!

Having the same functionality in power BI service & power BI mobile for windows 10 than in power BI mobile (for Android, iOS) would be great.

Weird that you currently have more functionality in the mobile apps than in the web browser or desktop app for windows 10, when it comes to taking a screenshot, making annotations and sharing.

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Denise Epifania on 05 Jul 2020 23:16:33

RE: Annotating visualizations!

Have a comments pane where individual comments are ordered by the most recent at the top. When someone makes a comment there would be the ability/option to take a snapshot of the current/active content--allowing users to follow along with the comment.

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