By Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and Mey Meenakshisundaram, Product Manager

Happy New Year!

We are happy to welcome you to this new year with a colorful new entrant to the power bi custom visuals family – the ‘Horizontal Funnel’. We are super excited to see constant stream of new visuals coming to the gallery and off to a great start this year 🙂

Funnel charts have become synonymous to sales pipeline analysis mainly because it communicates both the process itself and how the conversation happens at each stage.  Funnel chart also finds use cases in web site traffic analysis, order fulfillment or any business process analysis involving multiple stages.

Since we have a vertical funnel chart, one can ask why not have a horizontal funnel chart. Others might ask if the orientation matters at all.

For ages, people have debated between using bar vs column charts. Both Bar and column charts display data using rectangular bars where the length is proportional to the data. The main difference is only about the orientation, but it makes a huge difference for certain data.  One orientation is markedly efficient over the other, depending on the data. The same argument applies for funnel chart as well.

Some prefer a horizontal funnel chart over vertical for many reasons. It could be because it represents their business process better or the real estate better or provide more information with concise visual.  

But if you are not convinced or have a new year resolution to think before saying ‘Yes’, then think again (until you find ‘Yes’ as the answer). The visual is cool and we are sure that you can find creative ways of using it. If you listen to the video, you might think of using it as a Rocket ship to Jupiter.

This chart also has few other goodies. you can include a second customizable metric beneath the primary measure defining the size of the colored funnel segments. For example, if you want to call out the drop out or % besides the primary measure, you can do that.  It also comes with a tool tip option. You may tailor the tool tip to display a brief explanation of the data, to provide some contextual information, or give any other kind of information you’d like.

To use, simply download Horizontal Funnel chart from the visuals gallery and import it to your Power BI report and use it.

As usual, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts and your ideas for improvements.

Enjoy!