Line Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video we're going to look at line charts.
• 00:07 And Power BI has three charts that are essentially line charts.
• 00:13 The first one is called a line chart.
• 00:16 The second one is actually the area chart.
• 00:19 This is basically a line chart but
• 00:21 everything below the line is filled in with the shading.
• 00:23 So, same kinda deal.
• 00:26 The next one over, though, is slightly different.
• 00:28 It's kind of a hybrid between a stacked column chart and an area chart.
• 00:31 Basically what it does is it holds on to the previous state value and
• 00:35 actually uses that as the base for measuring its next height of line.
• 00:39 So, it's kind of a little bit of a hybrid.
• 00:41 But essentially these guys all sort of work the same way.
• 00:44 I'm gonna go and create a regular old line chart.
• 00:47 And I'm going to go add some sales and I'm gonna add some budgets to my line chart.
• 00:53 And you'll see that I get two data points.
• 00:55 And that's because I haven't really given it a series to work across.
• 01:00 The logical one where I find line charts work really well
• 01:02 is when we're working with dates and times.
• 01:05 Now I don't want date, that's gonna give me too many data points.
• 01:07 What I want is end of month.
• 01:09 So I'm gonna drag that into the axis area and you'll notice that it immediately,
• 01:13 because it's a date field, creates a hierarchy for me.
• 01:16 This is not what I want, so
• 01:17 I'm going to change it right now to say don't aggregate this into a hierarchy.
• 01:21 Just give me the end of month and
• 01:23 I now get a really nice looking little trend for my data.
• 01:28 Now that's cool and everything else,
• 01:29 but what if you have the standard that you're making up and you're working with.
• 01:34 Let's say for a second, when we go back to our Sales vs Budget Analysis,
• 01:37 let's say we did a little bit more to this.
• 01:39 We went back and we clicked the Format Painter and we chose our data colors.
• 01:43 I said, you know what, Sales,
• 01:44 I really wanted Sales to be a really nice dark blue.
• 01:49 So I went into Custom Color and I picked out a dark blue right here and
• 01:53 made really dark blue sales.
• 01:55 And my Budget, I said, you know what,
• 01:56 I really want that to be that nice gold color.
• 02:00 So if I'm happy with this chart.
• 02:02 Notice I put the legend at the bottom.
• 02:04 I've changed my data colors for my sales and for my budget.
• 02:07 I got a nice little title across the top.
• 02:08 Wouldn't it be nice if I could grab these things and port them into this chart
• 02:11 without having to reconfigure it on each and every individual piece?
• 02:15 And we can do that.
• 02:16 We'll grab the chart.
• 02:17 We click the the Format Painter button.
• 02:20 And then we'll go and click on the chart itself.
• 02:22 And you'll notice that many of these properties end up getting pulled over.
• 02:27 Although, it might not be ideal here because we've actually pulled over a whole
• 02:31 pile of data labels.
• 02:32 You can scroll over the chart and you can see the individual data points,
• 02:35 it'll show those things for us.
• 02:36 But do we really need the data labels on here?
• 02:40 So, if we go and scroll back up to the top here, we can say you know what,
• 02:44 let's go collapse data colors, data labels, let's turn those off.
• 02:48 Should I put my Y-axis back on,
• 02:50 yeah, I probably need to gauge what's actually happening here.
• 02:53 So this allows me to actually control the charts individually,
• 02:56 but take some of my common elements across.
• 02:59 So, do I really want this called Sales and Budget by End of Month?
• 03:03 Maybe not.
• 03:03 Maybe I could go back and say, again, let's do a sales comparison or
• 03:08 sales versus budget.
• 03:09 I'll put Sales versus Budget By month.
• 03:13 We don't need the end of in this whole thing.
• 03:16 There we are.
• 03:17 End, End.
• 03:18 All right.
• 03:19 What if I want to see a trend line?
• 03:22 Well that's found under this little magnifying glass.
• 03:24 We go into analytics.
• 03:26 You'll notice that we actually have a bunch of different trend lines.
• 03:29 But I'm just going to grab the regular trend line.
• 03:31 And say add, and
• 03:33 we'll call this one, well, it's called trend line one right now.
• 03:37 It doesn't show on the chart.
• 03:38 I'm practically pretty happy with that.
• 03:39 We can just leave it as is.
• 03:40 So there we go. We've got something that works
• 03:42 quite nicely there.
• 03:43 So these are some of the options that you might want to see and
• 03:46 play around with on your line charts.
• 03:48 There's lots of different things that we can do obviously to play with here.
• 03:51 I would highly encourage you to go and explore more of them.
• 03:54 But notice that those three areas, the fields listed area, where we drag on and
• 03:58 create the chart.
• 03:59 Our formatting area, we can go through and actually control a lot of the elements.
• 04:02 We also have the analytics area, where we can go and
• 04:05 add some trend lines to help add a little bit more to the story of our data.

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