How to See Data Trends in a Quick Way

OVERVIEW Power BI has launched a new preview visual called Sparklines. This visual is a popular feature requested by Power BI users. Sparklines is a tiny and simple chart that could be shown inside a single cell on a table or matrix. This chart will help us see trends of data in a quick way, at the same time allowing us to highlight the maximum and minimum values on a series of data.

Below is the example of Profit and Sales Sparklines by Month (-red marked). Note that Profit Sparklines is shown in the form of Column Chart and Sales Sparklines is shown in the form of Line Chart.

ENABLE SPARKLINES

The Sparklines feature is still in a preview,. Because of that, we need to enable this feature before we could start using it. To enable Sparklines, go to Options in Options and Setting menu, click the Preview features on the left navigation, and select Sparklines.

CREATE SPARKLINES IN TABLE OR MATRIX

Creating Sparklines in table or matrix visual are simple and easy. To start creating Sparklines, build your Table or Matrix visual as usual and add your data into it, click the Dropdown sign on the values field, and select Add a sparkline.

After that, set the Sparklines axis configuration (X and Y-Axis) just like setting an axis for line chart visual. You can specify the value on Y-axis and set its aggregation, also you can set the trend on X-axis, which can be the date or any other related field.

After its done, you can see a new column added to your Table or Matrix consisting of Sparklines.

FORMATTING THE SPARKLINES

Consider the following example. Here, we want to present the “Profit” Sparklines in another format and highlight the maximum “Sales”.

To present sparklines in another format, open the Format pane, click Sparklines, select the sparklines that needs to be formatted, and change the chart type. There are two types of chart type that we can use, first is Line chart and second is Column chart.

So, the formatting on the “Profit” sparklines will be changed to Column chart.

To highlight the maximum “Sales”, change the selected sparklines to “Sales” sparklines, click Marker, and select Highest to show the maximum value.

The result will look like the following figure.

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