How to Create and Format a Line Chart in Power BI

Create powerful line charts in Power BI Desktop

In this video, Matt will teach you how to create and format line chart visuals to get the most insight and value out of line charts in your Power BI reports.

Hi, this is Matt with Playfair+. In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to create a line chart and then format that line chart to gain additional insight and information. Line charts are one of the best chart types at creating for time series visualization. Anything you want to show a trend on a change over time, line charts are the place to start.

So let’s go ahead and dive into this tutorial. I’m going to create this line chart on a new screen, so I’m going to create plus, new page. Let’s start from scratch. So I want to do a line chart, make it a little bigger, and you can see on our slide, let’s see what we’ve done. Now, I’ve talked a lot about continuous data.

And what we would use a line chart for, and let’s say we want it to be a date analysis. We want to use time series data for this. So I have pulled in Full Date. Let’s go ahead and pull that onto the x-Axis, and you’ll see when you pull Full Date on it provides the entire hierarchy. So that’s a lot of information.

We might not need all of that. Let’s say we don’t need Year. We don’t need Quarter, we’re just going to do Month. So I’ve deleted everything else out. We’re at Full Date, Month now, and we’re going to do, again, Sales Amount. So let’s take a look at Sales Amount. It’s a useful column for this.

You can see, alright, we’ve created our Sales Amount view. We’ve got our months at the bottom, we’ve got our Sum of Sales Amount, and then we’ve got our line chart created. So that’s really all we’ve done. Simple line chart. Okay, let’s go back to our slide and say, let’s go from this view to a deeper analysis view.

So. Okay, we’ve gone from one line to multiple lines and we’ve formatted them. I’m taking a look at this visual and I want to say let’s, I’m going to duplicate it and just drag it below so that we can show the difference between the two. And then, alright, so in the example on our slide. We have four countries.

We’ve got Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Let’s, think to ourselves, okay, how do I make sure that my data is limited to those countries? Well, we can open our Filter pane and we’ll go down to our SalesTerritory table, and I’m going to drag Country onto filters on this visual. So, this will only affect this visual.

It will not affect the other example we’ve built at the top. We won’t see that change at all. And I’m going to go ahead and select Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Alright, great. We’ve got that done. We can close our Filters pane, but we only have them viewed in a single line. This is the sum of all of them together.

We need to make sure that Country is brought into Legend. Now we see the split. Now we’ve taken our data and we’ve sliced it. We’ve filtered it into multiple views, and we’re thinking to ourselves, Matt, that’s a lot of colors I’m looking at. How do I know what I’m focusing on? How do I draw the attention of my user to a single line?

Well, I’m going to use Australia as the key example for this, and I’m going to say let’s go into the Format pane again, and we’re going to make our changes. So, we can keep the Sum of Sales Amount as the header. That’s fine. We’ve got Month at the bottom, you know, I think we know that these are months, so I might say we can remove the title of Month. Maybe even this is a good example of going into the y-Axis title, and it by default is just the name of the column that you brought in with the aggregation. 

So Sum of Sales Amount, maybe I’ll call this, Total Sales just to change it so you can see the active reflection of the change to the header, of the title and the y-Axis here. And then let’s go in and really make the changes to our lines. So, I want to make sure, let’s swap all of these to, no, it won’t let me do all at once, because again, we’re split by category. So let’s go individually. So I want to make sure that we’re looking at.

Australia as the key, and then France will become, well, let’s make it a gray. We will do, well that may be a little light. Let’s do a gray, we’re going to bump down the size of the line and we’re actually going to make the line dotted. So it really, you can see it actively falling into the background. It’s something that is there for context, but it’s not going to be what you really are looking at or your focus is going to be drawn away from.

We’re going to change Germany to be the same color, same style, and then we’re going to do the same thing for the United Kingdom. I like this example because we get to do it three times. Helps us with the repetition so we can remember what we’re doing. We’re going to drop the pixel down to two.

We’re going to change the color to that dark gray that we used. And there we have again, we’re looking at Australia, really shine through at this point. Okay, now we want to add another additional piece. Let’s go to our Analytics pane and we want to add an average line in. I want to see what the average sales are for these four countries.

So let’s go ahead and add a line. And Average line one is fine, but let’s just call this Avg Sales. And then we’re going to be looking at the Sum of Sales Amount. Great. The line itself, I think this blue is, is pretty good. It’s transparent, it’s dashed. We want to make it two pixels, maybe even one pixel.

It’s not something that we really want to focus on. We just want to have it there as an example. And we’re going to turn the data label on for this, so we want to make sure it’s listed on the left. We want to take the style to be both. I want it to say Avg Sales and have the number and then the display units.

Let’s put this in millions so we can kind of shorten it down a little bit. Take up less space. Again, data-to-ink ratio. We probably don’t need to have the full number written out. We can just see that the average sales is a little over half a million and Australia is by and large doing better than the average of these countries.

So, that was really quick. But you can see the difference play out. We’ve gone from the Sum of Sales Amount by Month with just a single line, and with a few tweaks, we’ve really started our analysis level. So we’ve gone from this is a basic display to here’s a takeaway that we can have from these specific sales.

I’m Matt with Playfair+. Thanks for watching our line chart tutorial.