Visualize Forge Data with Power BI

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NARRATOR: Welcome to Visualize Forge Results with Power BI.

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Here we are in our space planning for new health

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guidelines learning path.

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And this is the last class in our visualizing building

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performance data with Forge Workflow.

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So you may be wondering, what is Power BI?

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Well, Power BI is a data visualization tool

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from Microsoft and it's available as part

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of their Office 365 platform.

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Now Power BI lets you easily create dynamic visualizations

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with whole bunch of different data inputs.

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And you can create visualizations

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that are interactive and that you can publish and share

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with others.

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What we're going to do now is we're

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going to use Power BI with the Forge results

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that we got in our last lesson.

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So in our last lesson we used Forge to export a CSV file

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with data from our model.

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In this lesson we're going to connect

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that CSV file to Power BI and then

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we're going to filter and visualize the data.

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So we're going to get total areas by category.

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We're going to visualize the areas.

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We're going to use this as an interactive tool

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to better understanding our building performance.

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So here I am in Power BI.

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And I'm going to go ahead and I'm

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going to click on the Get Data button.

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And I'm going to browse to the resultsfile.csv

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that I downloaded from Forge.

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So I click to select the file and then

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I get a brief preview of the data.

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So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm

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going to click the Load button.

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And now I'm inside of Power BI.

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Now going to click on the left hand side to see the data view.

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And when I do that I'm looking at something

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that's similar to the tabular format of Excel.

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I can see my columns, I can see my rows,

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and I can see all of the data.

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Now one thing to note is that the data that we extracted out

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of Revit, is showing the area for the various instances

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but it includes a square foot suffix.

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So that makes it difficult because that's

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text to actually do totals and get our total areas.

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So what we're going to do is we're

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going to go over to the right hand side

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where we see a little summary of our data file

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and I'm going to click the Data button.

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And then I'm going to choose New columns.

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So we're going to create a new column.

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And in the text field I'm going to type substitute parentheses

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and they're going to reference the area column.

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So I type resultsFile which is the name of my file.

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And then in brackets I type area which is the name of my column.

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And then I'm going to substitute space SF which is our suffix.

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And I'm going to substitute it with quote quote.

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So I'm going to substitute it with basically nothing.

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So I do that.

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And here is my new column and you

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can see I have the number of values

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but I don't have that suffix included with it.

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I'm going to go ahead and I'm going

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to right click on the column and choose Rename

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and I'm going to rename it as Area Number.

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And next with that column, that Area Number column selected,

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I'm going to go to the modeling tab up top

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and then I'm going to click the Data Type.

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So right now the data type for that column is set to text.

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I'm going to click the down arrow

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and I want to choose the Whole Number option.

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So I get a warning message because I'm changing

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the data type of that column.

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So Power BI wants to make sure that I really

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want to do this, which I do.

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I click Yes.

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And now you'll see that the numbers all of a sudden

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shifted over to the right so now they're right justified.

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And that's telling me that now they're

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being calculated as numbers as opposed to text.

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So I can click back to my visualization view.

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And here I am back to my report right now.

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So I'm going to go on the left hand--

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sorry stop.

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I'm going to go on the right hand side under visualizations.

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And I'm going to click on the lower left hand icon here which

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is for a slicer.

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So I click on Slicer.

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And then I want the slicer to act on the category.

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And a slicer is really an interactive tool

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that I can use to specify a value to filter

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by in my visualization.

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So we're going to use categories that

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will allow us to change the visualization

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to look at just roofs, just walls, walls and windows and so

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on.

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Next I'm going to click on the pie graph or pie chart

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icon in visualizations.

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And then I'm going to click Area Number and Family Name.

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So now I'm seeing a visualization of the area

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based on the family names of all the families in my CSV file.

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Let me make this a little bit bigger.

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And then next I want to click on the Table Visualization.

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And I'm going to choose to display

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the area number, the family name, and the family type.

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So these are all family names and types coming directly

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from data which comes directly from my model.

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So I can click on the categories inside of my slicer now.

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And you'll see that it actually is changing the pie graph

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and it's changing the table just to show those results.

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So next I'm going to go ahead and I'm

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going to click on the Label Visualization.

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For the label I'm going to choose the area number.

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So that's going to display the area for the current selection.

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And my last visualization I'm going to use a pie chart.

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And I'm going to choose area number and category.

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So now I can see the relative area

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for the selected categories.

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So in this case I can see that roofs

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are a much bigger percentage of area than windows.

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And if I don't have any got any category selected in my slicer

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I can see that walls are much bigger area compared

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to windows and roofs.

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So I'm going to drill specifically into walls

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and then again I can see it makes up 100% of that.

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And you'll notice to my label is showing me the area

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and it's rounding it to an approximate value.

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While there's 31,147 square feet of walls

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the label shows me as 31k.

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Now next I'm going to click on this Plus button.

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And let's say I want to visualize just the exterior

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wall.

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So I want to focus in and drill down on the exterior walls

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only.

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So I'm going to create a new page for my visualization.

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And then I'm going to click on the pie graph.

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And I'm going to choose the area number, category,

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and family names.

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So I can see that all of these categories

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and all the instances of those.

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Next I'm going to click on the Filter Field.

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And with category selected as the actual filtering

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field that we're going to look at,

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I want to just click the Walls option.

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So I want to filter to just show walls.

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And next I want to choose a new filter for family name.

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And if I click on Basic Filtering,

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I can change that to advanced.

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So with advanced filtering I can filter

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based on specific letters or characters or things like that.

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So under advanced filtering I want

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to change my setting to starts with

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and then I want to enter in the text field

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starts with the letter E.

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So this is going to filter for only the walls that

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begin with the letter E. And I know from looking at the data

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that all of my exterior walls have an e as the prefix.

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So I click that.

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And now I see and I apply that filter now

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I can get a much better picture of my exterior walls.

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I'm going to go ahead and click Label.

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And I'm going to use that label for the area number.

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And I can see now that I'm getting

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total of 46,000 square feet for the exterior wall.

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And if I click on any of the individual pieces in my pie

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chart, I can see the area for those specific wall

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types in the model itself.

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So I'm going to go up and I'm going to save my visualization.

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And now I can use this visualization

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as a tool to better understand building performance.

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And I can do this by visually comparing data directly

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from the model.

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So it's a lot easier to see comparisons in this format

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than if I were digging through a spreadsheet.

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So give it a try and see what you can come up with

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and what insights you can learn from your model data

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by using Power BI.