All about Sankey Charts

Let's consider a situation- you have 4 fields and you want to depict the flow with a help of visuals. The first thought can be to use a table or matrix in Power BI. It can depict the data but how about the intuitiveness? The solution for such scenarios is Sankey Charts which can help you to show different fields and the flow associated with them.

As a beginner in the BI world anyone can question- Is there a need for a Sankey chart when you already have a pool of options? Yes, we do need such charts if you are trying to visualize a process with respect to a particular field.

Protip- Sankey Charts are not available in your default library. You need to get it from the online library and keep in mind to only add certified visuals.

So, enough of the introduction let's showcase how the Sankey chart works. I am considering the SampleSuperstore dataset. The use case for the first visual is we are going to show the flow between Region and Category. The flow size will be governed by the amount of profit (putting the profit in the weight).

We have put the region in the source and the category in the destination. If you select any of the regions the flow will get highlighted as in the above-mentioned image. You can see the profit associated with different categories.

But still the visual doesn't look so intuitive. One of the reasons is the same or default color scheme of the flow. To change the color of the flows go to formatting of the visual and under the data link labels you can see the links. You can pick the color of your choice.

Protip- If you critically observe the above-mentioned image you can see I have picked the same color with different shades for a particular region. It just makes the visual more tidy and easy to spot a particular region.

Let's take a step forward and see the interactivity of such charts. We are creating two charts one is the Sankey chart with source as segment and destination as a category. Profit is in the weight. For another visual, we are considering profit and sales with every subcategory.

Now, if I select the flow Corporate to Technology in the Sankey chart then it will filter the clustered bar chart as well.

Isn't it interesting? As a BI analyst, I always keep the Sankey chart in my visual arsenal but it has a few limitations too. It can be cumbersome if either the source or the destination has more than 6-7 values. Consider you have 10 categories and 10 segments. In such cases, you can't decipher every flow in the visual. Also, what if every flow size has values of the same range. For instance, if the profit values are between 200k and 250k for all segments and categories then the visual becomes counter-intuitive in nature.

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