Exploring Synoptic panel visual in Power BI

What’s Synoptic panel visual and its uses?

Imagine you have a requirement to provide analytics on store, warehouse, parking, or office floor plan visualization within the Power BI report. The floor plan should be embedded in Power BI and when the end-users click on a specific part of the floor plan the report should interactively display the related KPIs. This is where Synoptic panel visuals come into the picture. The visual provides some baked-in images and examples but you can upload any image to create analytical visualization based on it.

In this blog post, we will be developing a report page using the Synoptic panel with a customs office floor plan image. We will be creating visuals showing the number of meetings in different rooms and the interactivity between the floorplan and the measures. Below is one of the sample visuals showing floor plan visuals embedded into the Power BI report.

OKViz Sample Store image integration in Synoptic panel visual in Power BI

Step-by-step implementation

Let’s start and implement the solution step-by-step. The Synoptic panel is a free visual by OKViz that you can import into Power BI.

Synoptic Panel visual

Once you have imported the visual, it will provide you the link where you can design the map/ plan as mentioned below. If you are using the existing design from the Gallery then it will need Category, Subcategory and Measure columns to display the visual.

The Gallery has below existing plans that you can use for visualization and analytics.

Available designs in Synoptic Panel gallery

In our use case, we will be creating a new design using a custom office floor plan image. To create a new design visit https://synoptic.design/

Synoptic Designer for Power BI

In our example, I am using a sample office floor plan from SmartDraw. You are free to upload your store, warehouse, or office plan here.

Synoptic Designer for Power BI

Once you have uploaded the image, click on one of the areas (in our case it’s the rooms). Once the room is correctly highlighted you can enter the name.

Synoptic Designer for Power BI

Similarly, perform the same action for other areas as well. The portal automatically detects the lines and shape of the area when you click.

Synoptic Designer for Power BI

Once you have completed the desired selection, you can click on the “Export to Power BI” button, and on the next screen, you can save the image.

For this example, we need some sample meeting and office rooms data, so I have entered dummy data in below 2 tables. The end report will show the number of meetings (Counts) in each room.

Table: SampleOfficeMeeting
Table: SampleRoom

In the next step, just upload the image of the floor plan and add columns in Category, Subcategory, and Measure.

In this example, I am using ID as category, Name as Subcategory, and Num as the measure to show the number of meetings in each room. This will help to match the floor plan image to data and hence will provide interactivity with other visuals.

Edit the settings/ format for Synoptic panel visual to set the color, Data labels, Legend, etc. as per your requirements. I have also created a table visual to show the interactivity between the floor plan image and table data.

Final Output
When a record is selected in Table visual. E.g.: Office Room 1
When one of the areas in the floorplan image is selected the table visual also gets filtered accordingly

Wrap-up

This is a great and easy way of visualizing real-world floor plans or map scenarios with KPIs interactivity. As mentioned, the use cases can be endless but specifically, such visuals are of great use for a store, warehouse, parking, traffic/ delivery, and office plans analytics. I have covered a very simple example in this blog post but I hope it helps anyone looking to achieve such type of reporting.

1 thought on “Exploring Synoptic panel visual in Power BI”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *