Combination Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're gonna look at combination charts.
• 00:08 Which is essentially where we have a combination of column and
• 00:11 line charts together.
• 00:13 Power BI has two of them.
• 00:14 They've got the line and stack column chart, and my personal favorite,
• 00:18 which is the line and clustered column chart.
• 00:19 Now I'm gonna click on this one.
• 00:22 Generally you'll find that I tend to use more of the clustered column charts.
• 00:25 I don't like my data series stacked on top of each other in bars.
• 00:28 I like to see them next to each other because then I can see what's actually
• 00:31 going on with them.
• 00:31 You may have picked up on that from what I've built so far.
• 00:34 The first thing I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna for my sales and I'm gonna grab that and
• 00:38 put this onto my column values.
• 00:40 I'm then gonna go and
• 00:43 grab from my calendar field, my end of month, put that under the shared axis.
• 00:48 It aggregates into a date hierarchy, so
• 00:50 you can tell that I can use drill down on this chart if I want.
• 00:53 You can see all the icons there.
• 00:54 But, that's not what I'm looking for, I'd like to see this by end of month.
• 00:58 And I've now got a nice little chart that actually shows
• 01:01 some of the stuff that i am looking at, which is kinda cool.
• 01:04 Now what if I wanted to go and show something else, like Budgets.
• 01:09 Well budgets work on the same axis type scale, same values, so
• 01:12 this is a no brainer to add, again to the column values on this chart,
• 01:16 because I can actually see and compare the trends side by side.
• 01:19 So this all works for me nicely.
• 01:22 I'm not a big fan of the colors on it though, they're the defaults.
• 01:24 But you know what? I've already formatted on one of my other
• 01:27 pages into the colors I like, so why not go and grab that chart,
• 01:31 go to format painter, come back over to page two here, and
• 01:35 click on my chart to inherit all these things?
• 01:37 And yet you know what?
• 01:38 Those data labels, that's just way too much.
• 01:41 So I'm gonna go back and turn those off.
• 01:44 Here we are. Data labels are off and
• 01:45 we'll turn the Y axis back on.
• 01:47 Now you've seen this kind of a chart before.
• 01:50 Maybe not in these exact colors, but
• 01:52 this looks pretty similar to what we've built in the past.
• 01:54 But what we wanna add now, is I'd like to see,
• 01:58 while it's great that I can mouse over each data point, see what the sales are,
• 02:01 I'd really like to know what the trend of units is actually doing.
• 02:05 So, this is where we can make use of the column charts, or
• 02:09 the combination chart aspect of this particular piece.
• 02:12 So I'm gonna grab here, go to our field list.
• 02:16 Just collapse these out of the way for a second, and we're gonna scroll down near
• 02:19 the bottom, we'll find units and drag that onto the line values.
• 02:26 Now you'll notice that we get a thin red line showing up way down the bottom.
• 02:30 Now the reason for
• 02:31 this is because it's actually showing the units on the same scale.
• 02:34 So as you can imagine, with all of our units,
• 02:37 37,000 being sold because they go for much higher prices, the volumes are way higher.
• 02:41 So this line is really really small compared to what we actually need.
• 02:45 I'd love to see this more representative of what's actually going on.
• 02:49 In order to do that I actually need to change the axis that this is plotted on.
• 02:52 I need to plot it on a secondary axis.
• 02:55 So I'm gonna come over to my format painter, and I'm gonna go
• 03:00 down into the Y axis options and you'll notice that when you start working in
• 03:04 the screen here that's a little bit small, you'll run into some challenges here.
• 03:08 So I've got a scroll bar that will scroll me through some of the options and
• 03:11 it's not exactly obvious, but you see the half a box down here?
• 03:15 Well there's a secondary scroll bar in here.
• 03:17 And if I go and
• 03:18 scroll that, I get the option to play around with some other things.
• 03:22 One of those items, if I just open this up a little bit more is show secondary.
• 03:26 What this will do, is it actually, when I click it watch what it does to the charts.
• 03:31 It will actually change the charts quite drastically,
• 03:33 because now we get secondary access put into place.
• 03:36 So for the line series, it will run based on the secondary access.
• 03:43 If I go and shrink this back down a little, we will see the chart can expand
• 03:46 a little bit more, you can see what's happening here.
• 03:48 Now, am I happy with it?
• 03:50 I can probably make some more changes but at the end of the day,
• 03:53 I think this is a pretty good use of a chart.
• 03:55 We can actually see that we have got some different values for our sales and
• 03:58 budgets and we can see that the units are actually there showing in a different way.
• 04:02 Maybe I don't want to use that.
• 04:03 Maybe I would rather have a trend line for
• 04:05 my budget rather than show the units at all.
• 04:07 Well that's easy enough.
• 04:08 I can take units off, and I can just move budgets down onto the line values.
• 04:13 Now, at this point, I don't really need a secondary access,
• 04:16 because these things are the same.
• 04:17 As a matter of fact, I probably shouldn't have on here.
• 04:19 So, I can go back and say, let's go back to the Y-axis.
• 04:23 And let's actually take the secondary access and
• 04:26 turn it off to put the trend back into the right place.
• 04:30 We'd probably choose different color from my lines but
• 04:33 at this point you can see that we can actually start combining this charts
• 04:36 together into creative ways that work quite nicely.

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