User Experience for PowerPivot Solutions
PowerPivot for Excel provides an environment for rapid development of reports and dashboards from related yet potentially disparate data sources. However, the ease with which the data can be combined and reports created can cause the user experience to be overlooked.
Note I am at heart a database guy who geeks out over the data capabilities of PowerPivot. The intent of this section is to share a few tips on creating a pleasing user interface with PowerPivot. I am not a user experience professional, but have found my way to creating workable user interfaces.
Connect Slicers Visually
The ease with which PowerPivot slicers can be added can cause user confusion. This is especially the case in a PowerPivot report when all slicers do not relate to all charts/tables. For example, if a single slicer applies only to a subset of the PivotCharts or PivotTable elements of the report, there is no visual cue as to how a slicer is filtering each report element.
In this case, I use Excel formatting to visually link the elements that relate to each other. To illustrate the example, consider the reports in Figure 11-8. The Origin State and Departure Airport are connected in that they filter data for the Weather PivotChart. Those two fields affect only the Weather chart, and not others that you see in the figure. To make the relationship plain to the user, I've chosen to color the background cells blue to match the bars in the chart. You may need to explain that approach once or twice to your users, but you'll find that they quickly catch on.
Figure 11-8. Visual cue for slicer connection
Lose the Grid
To reduce the number of steps, many of the examples in this book do not adhere to this very powerful tip to create a more pleasing user interface. However, it is widely held that PowerPivot tables and charts simply look more appealing to users without Excel's grid-lines. Combined with removing the row and column headers, a custom-application look and feel can be quickly created.
To hide the grid-lines, select Page Layout from the ribbon. Then uncheck the Gridlines View check box, as illustrated in Figure 11-9. Similarly, row and column headings can be removed by unchecking the adjacent Headings View check box.
