A Power BI visual becomes difficult to read without data labels. At the same time, adding data labels in Power BI visualization is a good practice. Many analysts often include data labels in their visuals.
You might wonder what a data label is in Power BI. Don’t worry.
In this Power BI tutorial, we will explain data labels in Power BI and how to add data labels in Power BI. Also, we will see how to format the data labels in Power BI.
Additionally, we will discuss what is power BI Custom Data Labels and how to add them to a chart.
Power BI Data Labels
In Power BI, a data label is a value displayed on a chart or visualization that provides information about the data point.
This helps users quickly understand the specific data associated with each point without the need to refer to the hover over the Point.
Imagine you have a simple line chart in Power BI that shows the monthly sales revenue for your business. Each point on the line represents the sales revenue for a specific month.
After adding the data label, the line chart looks like the screenshot below.
How to Add Data Labels in Power BI
This example shows how to add data labels in Power BI.
Scenario:
You manage a retail store that sells various products, and every month, you analyze the sales data for different product categories to understand which categories are performing well and which ones may need improvement.
You want to add data labels to the chart to display the exact sales revenue value for each product category directly on the Power BI chart.
In this scenario, we have an Excel file named SalesData with columns Product Category, Sales Revenue (USD), and Date. Check the screenshot below.
Now follow the below steps to add Power BI data labels:
1. Open Power BI Desktop and load data using the Get data option. Then, you can see data in the Data pane.
2. Under the Home tab, expand Visual gallery(black box) -> Click the Stacked column chart.
3. Then, using the +Add data option, add Month into the X-axis, Sales Revenue (USD) into the Y-axis, and Product Category into the Legend field.
4. Now you can see the Stacked column chart created successfully.
5. Now Select the Stacked column chart -> Click the Format pane -> select the Visual -> enable the Data labels.
6. After that, you can see in the Stacked column chart that you enable Data labels.
This way, you can add data labels in Power BI to display the exact sales revenue value for each product category directly on the chart.
Format Power BI Data Labels
This example will explore the format options available for Power BI data labels.
I hope you all enable data labels on your Power BI Visual.
When you expand Data labels in the Format pane, you will find dropdown options: Options, Title, Value, Detail, Background, and Layout. Check the screenshot below.
Let’s look at each option in the dropdown one at a time.
Format Power BI Data Labels using Options:
With this formatting, we can adjust the orientation of the data labels to either vertical or horizontal. Additionally, we can change the position of the data labels to inside end, inside center, or inside base.