Data Bars are new in Power BI (June 2017)

Looking at a bunch of data does not give a feeling for the big and small values without making comparisons by reasoning. This next table is trivial in that you can easily see the small and big values. However I have chosen this to make the explanation easy to understand.

This comparison is built into the idea of presenting data bars in Microsoft programs such as MS Excel and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2012.

In the June 2017 version of Power BI Desktop which is in preview 'Data Bars' are supported. What Data Bars do is to show visually how big or small data values are. Here is an example from my previous post how the data is visualized after adding Data Bars.

Four types of Data Bars are shown in the above: Data Bars, Color Scales, Icon sets and 'Above average' types.

In the present version this is how 'Data Bars' feature is implemented.

I have imported the same data as in the previous post into Power BI using 'Get Data'.

I added the two fields 'State' and 'Item Value' into the fields as shown above.
 I had to rename 'State' to 'St' as 'State' may be keyword in Power BI which automatically formats as s map (this was on another page of the view)

This is probably some 'bug' in the software in this Preview version here.

Now right click the 'Item Value' in the fields as shown.

In the Conditional formatting menu choose 'Color scales'.

Here you can choose colors to represent Minimum, Middle and Maximum values and click OK.

That is all there is to it.