Best practices to use Gauge

[s15]

Hi all,

I have a sample financial dataset which reports my revenue of 5 products.

What I need is to show Gauge chat to display my sales target. By default it's always show a half like the photo below.

I know I need to create a column called Target Sales then put my number in this column. However, this column would have many row with the same value. Is there a way that I can put the target sales value. What is the practice of using Gauge to compare with the objective value.

[Anonymous]

Hi @s15

You need to differentiate between max value and target value.

The simple way to go about this would be to just create a measure, which determines a certain max value and target value. So the solution to your problem very much depends on your target and what should be the max value. If you provide that I can make a slution for you.

Hope this makes sense. I'll gladly elaborate if needed.

Best,

Martin

[s15]

@Anonymous and @vanessafvg

What is the use case of using max value in Gauge chart?

Thank you very much.

[Anonymous]

@s15

Since I don't know what your target is, I'm going to assume that your target is to outperform last year with 5%. The target measure would then look like this: 

Sales last-year-to-date = CALCULATE([Sales year-to-date]; DATEADD(TimeDim[Date];-1;YEAR))

In order to make this possible you need a measure for sum of sales and sum of sales year-to-date. They look like this:

Sales = SUM(Table[Sales])

Sales year-to-date = CALCULATE([Sales]; DATESYTD(TimeDim[Date])).

You would then plot Sales last-year-to-date on your target measure and Sales year-to-date as value.

As for the max value, you could just use some arbitrary number relative to the total sum of sales. I don't have any good suggestion for the max value. That depends on your data and how you would like the gauge to display.

Hope this makes sense.

Best,

Martin

[s15]

@Anonymous

Thank you very much for the example. This makes sense.

I just wanted to know if there is any reason from sales/business perspective to use max value since we have target.

Say my revenue last year is 1,000 USD. Now I need it to be 1,500. This is the target value I need. So what would be the case in which the max value is needed?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@s15

I just realized I forgot to times the Sales last-year-to-date with 1,05. I hope my example made sense anyway. Sorry about that.

Regarding what to choose as max value I honestly don't know. That very much depends on how you want you visual to behave. In your example I could imagine that it would make sense to just have your target value as max value. When we are dealing with sales there isn't really a limit for how much you can sell, so plotting a max value is ambiguous (to me). I imagine that the max value is suppose to be a max potential or best case measure. So say you want to outperfom last year with 5% and best case is your outperform with 10%, then that would be max value. Anyway, that is just one way to go about it.

What do you think? Does this make sense?

[vanessafvg]

@s15

there a variety of columns provided with the gauge max value etc what do you want it to look like, you need to view the settings and columns available to be popualated with this data.  the number of rows you have would be irrelevant - have a target placed in the correct column will adjust it accordingly

ie. create your sales target slap it there and see what happens,