Decomposition trees or dendrograms are a powerful and easy-to-implement visualisation in Microsoft Power BI. It offers a way to break down your data into further categories within a limited dashboard space while maintaining interactivity by giving users the ability to choose what categories they’d like to view. As decomposition trees can break off into multiple branches, it becomes tempting to fit in as much data as possible. This can make composition trees complicated as it breaks off into multiple branches and can make it hard to visualise data. This blog takes you through the perfect use case for decomposition trees to maximise how effectively we use this visualisation in Power BI.
On day 3 of dashboard week, we were challenged to create a Power BI dashboard. While creating my dashboard, I came across the issue of creating dynamic slicers to show a different categories and subcategories within it. To solve this issue, I opted to use a decomposition tree to show the breakdown of the categories and sub-categories. A screenshot of my dashboard utilising the decomposition tree can be found here:
Decomposition trees are a great way to show a breakdown of sub-categories within categories and details within this such as a count of items for a sub-category. To add to another layer of interactivity to the dashboard, you can use the decomposition tree as a diagram to filter other charts. This allows you to maximise the limited space within the dashboard without sacrificing dashboard interactivity.