Hello and welcome, my name is Manuel
Quintana with Pragmatic Works, and in
collaboration with MAQ Software, we're
bringing you today's video to explore
their custom visual known as the Brick
Chart. Now this visual is comprised of a
hundred little bricks, and each of
those are colored depending on the
percentage breakdown of each of the
individual category values. That's really
neat, and you can quickly look and see
how much of a percentage this
category takes up. Also, there's some
pretty fun, neat formatting options in
the form of animations that comes along
with this visual. So come on with me, and
let's explore the Brick Chart from MAQ
Software. Alright so here we are
exploring the Brick Chart from MAQ
Software, and we can see right away
exactly the purpose of its
representation—100 bricks.
We're showing
manufacturers and the total units
they've sold year-to-date.
Notice there's this fun little
animation that comes along with it. What
we actually are demonstrating here in
this page is actually the difference of
a gradient color scaling and a non-
gradient. You have this nice little
sheen within each of the little bricks.
You have that gradient scale—something
that can be toggled on or off, and we
will look at that here momentarily. I
also did want to demonstrate and explain
that negative values within your
categories are actually not displayed, so
the hundred percent is going to be
specific to the values that we have here.
We can actually see Palma in this
case is negative, but it is not
represented here within the legend
itself because of the negative values.
Also, if there is some sort of remainder
element here—in this regard, we see we
have three manufacturers that sell the
exact same amount: 300, 300, 300. Out of
the 900, this is gonna end up being 33,
so it's 33.33% repeating. Hence, when
there's these remainders, we actually
just leave it with a blank square, so we
can still keep that nice even
distribution as it should be. But it's
nice! We can see at the very top ABBA is
this manufacturer, the total amount
they've sold, which represents three
point three five percent so three little
bricks. That's exactly how this should be
portrayed. We're gonna see in
the formatting area there's also a ton
of different choices on how we should
represent each of the bricks and various
different opportunities and elements in
regards to how we should have the
animations perform. We can control
that all in the format area, so let's
take a quick look at what we can do
after we have mapped a value to the
category and then a value to the value
area. We of course can control the
various different colors; in this case,
we only have three categories, and in this
one we have far more, but we are in
complete control of those. General
naturally is gonna just dictate the
border and the location of the visual, as
would be standard. We can turn on and off
the legend, but here is where we can
dictate the shape. In this regard, we
can choose we want square, rectangle—how
do we want the box to represent itself.
We can choose that right here.
As well, of course, the brick types: block,
dot, diamond. We see the three individual
items represented here right on this
home page, and of course the last two
things that are really fun—really neat—
do we want a gradient scaling? In this
one here, we can turn this off and you're
going to see we're just here to get more
of a flat color representation here
versus you get this gradient scale, and
well, what type of animations do we
want? Do we want the stack left? Do we want
the corner stretch? Lots of different
ways just to make this a little more fun. It
adds a little extra element here just
drawing more attention to the eye.
It's always good to have a little bit of
fun. Hopefully you enjoyed this video, and
thank you for watching. If you have any
questions about this visual or need a
similar business solution, feel free to
contact MAQ Software at 
sales@maqsoftware.com.
As well, for any of your Power BI
training needs, be sure to reach out to
us at Pragmatic Works by emailing
training@pragmaticworks.com. Take
care!
