Do not postpone or ignore formatting options. It's not just about making the report pretty; it's about adding more value to the visual. Sure, you can make it more visually appealing with formatting; however, with formatting, you can also add some static information that provides more value on the report. A great example of this is the gauge, which we'll create in this chapter. When you first create the visual, the amount will always be set at 50%, which doesn't provide much value. With formatting, you can set a maximum target amount and a minimum which makes the visual more valuable, as you can see in the following screenshot:
The preceding image shows the out-of-the-box gauge on the left and the same gauge formatted on the right. If all your gauges looked like the one on the left, you might as well just list the amount, which is a card visual, rather than using a gauge.
We will cover formatting (and filtering from earlier) as we create visuals, which is next.