How to Create Scatter Plots in Power BI

Create stunning scatter plots in Power BI Desktop

In this video, you will learn how to create scatter plots in Power BI Desktop. Starting with a basic scatter plot, Matt will also review multiple formatting options to show how you can gain additional insights from your visual.

Hi, this is Matt with Playfair+. In today’s video, I’m going to create a basic scatter plot in Power BI and then add a few additional formatting options that’ll show the power of PBI and how you can gain additional insight from this really powerful viz type. So let’s go ahead and dive in on scatter plots.

Now we have our scatter plot. We’re going to go ahead and check the scatter plot option available to us in Power BI. So it is a default chart type love, that that’s available. Um, and then we need both the x-Axis and the y-Axis to make this one work. So, let’s take a look at what we’ve got selected in our slide and go back over to our actual slide and you can see what we have here.

On our values. We’ve brought in Subcategory, so it’s a new one for us. It’s in the product. Table. So we’re navigating back to Product table, and we’re going to say, let’s bring in Subcategory to values, and we’re going to bring in Sales Amount to the x-Axis. So that’s in our sales table, our fact table. So Sales Amount to x-Axis.

And you can see without having both axes, it’s just going to be a solid line. And then on the y-Axis. Let’s do Profit. We built that Profit column. Let’s go ahead and throw that in there. And you can see our scatter plot start to take shape. Now when you’re looking at this, you can see the Mountain bikes, Road bikes and Touring bikes.

They kind of blow out the axes a little bit. So let’s go ahead and see if we can remove Bikes from this view. And one of the things that we’re going to do is we’re going to go in and we’re going to take Category. We’re going to add this to our filters, and we are going to say, let’s have Components, let’s have Clothing, let’s have Accessories.

We do not want to have bikes. It shrinks everything down so much. So let’s say Bikes. You, you did not make the cut. Sorry. Okay. That’s what we need to do for our filtering. It’s a good example to kind of see when you want to exclude a portion of data, what happens when you do that. So, alright. Then we’ve got our Subcategory.

We’ve got our Legend is going to be Subcategory as well. And why are we doing that? Well, we want to make sure we’ve got different colors for things then. We will fix this. Don’t worry. I know you’re looking at it and going, Matt, there’s way too many subcategories to fit on here. That’s right. There are, but this is kind of the basic view of creating that scatter plot.

Now how do we go from this scatter plot that has Subcategory information onto, take a look at our slide, a Sales vs. Profit Non-bike Category Analysis. Okay. Well. We’re going to certainly change things up, so let’s duplicate this. We’ll pull it over so we can look at it again. And I think the first thing we noticed when we pulled Subcategory onto Legend, it really didn’t work.

It doesn’t help me. It doesn’t show me too much to have a unique color for any of these. Because now I’ve really lost any kind of grouping. But what if we brought Category onto Legend? Okay, now we have three categories. It’s a, it’s a pretty good grouping for us to use. It allows us to take a better look at what Category is doing the most in Sales and Profit.

It looks like Components is a very profitable, very high-selling option. And we’re going to make some more format changes here to clean this view up a little bit. So, let’s take a look at our Markers. Those are the dots that are currently on our scatter plot, and let’s make changes. So let’s start with Accessories, and if we scroll back to our bar chart, example, Accessories was done in yellow, Clothing in cream or teal, and Components in blue.

So let’s make sure when we’re on our new scatter plot, we’re on the Format visual tab. We’re looking at our markers, and I’m going to start with Accessories, and I’m going to say, let’s make Accessories a diamond, but let’s also change them to that same yellow. So now we’re connecting the dots. Um, quite literally.

Accessories yellow. So we’ll move back into our Markers and we’ll do Clothing. With our, and we’ll do a separate, let’s take Clothing as a triangle and let’s say, let’s make this, that teal that we used. Oof. I chose such a rough teal. Don’t worry. I’ll switch all these at the break.

And then let’s take one last look at our Components. And let’s make sure that that is that navy that we used earlier. So now we’ve got three different shapes, to differentiate. We’ve got colors to show the connection. Again, it’s double encoding, but it helps when we’re drawing attention between two charts and we put all these together in our final report view and our dashboard view, you’ll see why we’ve connected them in the way that we did.

So, alright, so now we’re looking at the scatter plot here. Um. Let’s go ahead and make some more visual changes. So we are looking at General, let’s look at our Effects. I want to make sure our background, we don’t really need a background on. It’s white, it’s the same color as our background. We can certainly turn that off.

We have the visual border off right now. This title is really long. Sum of Sales Amount and Sum of Profit Column by Subcategory and Category. That is a mouthful. I don’t think we want many of our users to be looking at that. So let’s say Sales vs. Profit, Non-bike Categories. See if my typing works.

Yes. So again, I like doing a centered title on something like this and we can bump it up. A few pixels to make it larger. You can even bold it if you want. You can. Italicize, underline. I think eighteen’s a pretty good size for this, so all right, now we’re looking pretty well. We’ve got Sum of Sales Amount, Sum of Profit column.

You know, again, those are titles that we could, we need to have them on. We can’t remove them. But I think we can say, let’s look at Sales here, or let’s look at Profit on the y-Axis. We don’t need to have the full written out title. That is just a mouthful. So, and then Profit, so we’ll change Sales, Profit.

One other thing, we’ve got grid lines. I don’t really necessarily need the grid lines. I think that they’re a little distracting to me. So let’s remove our horizontal, remove our vertical grid lines. But we do want to provide some additional context. And in our example on our slide we have a few additional lines in the Analytics pane we can put a trend line on.

I think that’s nice to have for something like this, especially when we start filtering this information. And we can have average lines, so I think it’s really nice to have both an average on Sales Amount and an average on Profit. So you kind of see how they shape up, see where we’re hitting average Profit, see where we’re hitting average Sales, and then what the overall trend is.

This is Matt with Playfair+. Thanks for watching.