How to Create an Amazon-esque Shipping Status report in Power BI

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how we can create a shipping status in Power BI that visually shows the selected order’s shipping status. This will have look and feel similar to shipping statuses on websites like Amazon, providing a clear way to see your order’s status visually!

Before we begin, let’s first understand the data. We have three tables in this model:

  • Statuses
  • Orders
  • Order Statuses

The Statuses table has a unique value for each shipping status and a status sort column. The status sort column is used to sort the shipping status by the shipping lifecycle (chronological order) rather than sorting the shipping statuses alphabetically. You can read more about “sort by” at this link.

In our example, we are assuming that each order goes through four shipping statuses, as per the sequence below:

Shipping Status

The next table is the Orders table, which is just simple a list of the orders and their respective order amounts. In our example, we have five orders as seen below.

Orders List

The Order Status table contains the shipping status for each order. Each row represents the shipping status of a certain order at any given moment. This table will be the one driving the logic to use the Amazon-esque shipping status. Let’s have a quick look at the data in our Order Statuses table:

Orders Shipping Status

In the Order Status table, we are just storing the shipping value; in a real scenario, we would probably have a shipping status key, but that won’t have any impact on our final output here so we can skip it. If we had a shipping status key, the only that thing that would need to be changed would be to make the relationship between the Order Statuses and Statuses tables based on the shipping status key column.

Let’s take a quick look at the relationship diagram for this model. It’s pretty straightforward: one order can have more than one shipping status and one status can have multiple orders.

Relationship Diagram

Now that we have good understanding of our tables and their relationships, we can move into the fun part! To visualize the Amazon-esque shipping status, we will need to add two measures into our model. These simple measures will be used on a line chart visual in order to give us the look and feel we we want.

Measure 1: The Show Status measure will be used to show the grey line and circles for the shipping status. If an order is selected, the measure will return a fixed value of 1, otherwise it will return a blank value. This measure is essentially used to visualize the grey shipping status line and circles.

Show Status = 
VAR _SelectedOrder = SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Orders'[Order] )
RETURN 
IF ( NOT ISBLANK ( _SelectedOrder ),
    1 
)

Measure 2: The following Highlight Status measure will return a fixed value of 1 based on each shipping status of the order, which is in turn based on the current row context of the status from the Statuses table. This measure is essentially used to visualize the highlighting of the shipping status line and circles depending on where to the order is in the shipping status timeline.

Highlight Status = 
VAR _SelectedOrder = SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Orders'[Order] )
VAR _orderStatus = 
IF ( NOT ISBLANK ( _SelectedOrder ),
//find out if current selected order has row(s) filtered on status in the current row context  
  CALCULATE (
        COUNTROWS ( 'Orders Statuses' ),
        TREATAS(   
            VALUES ( 'Statuses'[Status] ),   
            'Orders Statuses'[Status]
        )
    )
)
RETURN
--if no row found then return blank else return 1 to highlight the status in the visual
IF ( NOT ISBLANK ( _orderStatus ), 1 )

Now let’s put everything together. Create a tooltip page with a line chart that will be used to show the shipping status of the order. To learn more about how to create a report tooltip page, refer to this link.

Here are the steps to create a tooltip page:

  • Under page information, turn on Tooltip.
  • Set the page size to a custom size of 414×120.
  • Add a line chart visual.
  • On the x-axis, add the Status column from the Statuses table.
  • Under values, add the Show Status and Highlight Status measures.

🤚

The sequence of these measures in the values section of the line chart is very important. Make sure that the first measure in the values section is Show Status. Also, on the formatting pane, change the data colour for this measure to grey.
Measures sequence in line chart
Change color to Grey

I then added a page that has two visuals – a bar chart and a matrix, as you can see in the video – and assigned the previously created report tooltip page as the tooltip for these visuals. Voila – as we hover over a data point in our visuals, we can see the highlighted shipping status of the order!

Showing Shipping Status of an Order.
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👉 Make sure to subscribe to our blog post. In the near future, I will create something similar given we don’t have a separate table for order statuses but only the most recent shipping status available for an order.

How to show the sum of non-selected categories grouped together as "Other" category in visuals

I recently came across an interesting problem regarding how you can show the sum of values of certain selected categories as separate bars in a bar chart – but with the sum of all the non-selected categories being grouped together in an “Other” category/bar. If you take a look at the above video, you can see that as I select various categories the value for the “Other” bar is changing (the last bar). It also shows you the difference between the Total Sales and all the selected categories. If all the categories are selected (or no category is selected), then the “Other” bar disappears from the visual.

The particular business use case is that when there are too many categories, visuals can get very cluttered. I wanted to come up with a solution for this problem and I came up with this method to show only selected categories as individual bars with the rest of categories summed together in a separate – “Other” – bar in the visual. This method isn’t only applicable to bar charts – you can use it in any visual!

Let’s first look at our sample data and then the solution. The following sample data contains only three columns: Category, Sales, and Category Sort. The Category Sort column is used to sort by column for the Category column .

Sample Data

First and foremost part of the solution is to create a table with distinct Category values and add a record with Other as category value and this will be used to show sum of all non-selected categories, See screen shot below. I gave the sort order value for Other row to 999999, big enough number that it shows up at as the last value in the visuals, if we want Other to be the first row in the visual, I will set the Category Sort value to like negative 1 (-1).

Category Table with Other as special row

Make sure this Category table doesn’t have relationship with your main data table.

I added following measures to make the calculation work, I created multiple measures but all this can be collapsed into one, my performance preference is to create separate measures, so that measures can be recycled where possible.

Sum Sales is a base measure.

Sum Sales = SUM ( Data[Sales] )

Sum All is a measure used to get us Total Sales regardless of selection of Categories. 

Sum All = CALCULATE ( [Sum Sales], ALL ( Data[Category] ) )

Sum Others is a measure to show what value we have for non-selected categories, in other case, what value we will see in Other category when we will visualize our data.

Sum Others = [Sum All] - [Sum Sales]

Sum Sales and Others is the core measure which we will use in the visual, I have added the comments in the measure to explain what each row in the measure is used for.

Sum Sales and Others =
VAR __valueOther = "Other" --variable to store the value for "Other" so that we have it at one place to use in the DAX
VAR __selectedCategory =  --create a table of selected categories and append "Other" as an extra row
UNION (
    VALUES ( Data[Category] ),
    { __valueOther }
)
RETURN
IF ( MAX ( Category[Category] ) = __valueOther,  --check if current value is "Other"
    IF ( [Sum Others] > 0, [Sum Others] ), --if condition to suppress other value in case all the categories are selected,
    CALCULATE (
        [Sum Sales],
        //TREATUS is used to filter data table
        TREATAS  (
            INTERSECT ( VALUES ( Category[Category] ), __selectedCategory ),  --get list of categories that are selected
            Data[Category]
        )
    )
)

In above measure, if want to show 0 value for Other if all the categories are selected then remove IF condition line in the measure and just simply use Sum Others measure.

Since we have all our measures in places, we will visualize the data. Let’s add a slicer for Category and make sure the Category column in this case is used from your Data Table not from Category Table.

Add a Stacked Column Chart or any other visual you would like to see. On X-Axis, put Category from Category Table and put Sum Sales and Others measure in Values section.

Bar Visual

👉 Make sure on X-Axis, put Category from Category Table, not from Data Table.

and that’s it, as you can see at the start of the post, Other bar value will change based on the selected categories. I hope you can leverage this technique to meet your business needs. Let me know what you think. Share your thoughts.

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