4: Developing reports and visualizations using the Power BI Desktop
4.6 Create a line chart
4: Developing reports and visualizations using the Power BI Desktop
4.6 Create a line chart - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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Video transcript
<v Lecturer>Okay, so in this sub-lesson,</v> we're gonna just create a line chart, and then we're gonna go through and format that line chart. Let's go ahead and get the Power BI file open that's gonna support this sub-lesson. And just go ahead and wait a moment here. Okay, so we have our desktop file open here. And what we're gonna do here is on the overview page, keep in mind, once again, we still have two pages, so we have overview and product information, which we just created a moment ago in a previous sub-lesson. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a line chart in this space right here. So I'm just gonna click on the canvas to make sure it has focus. What we're going to do is go into the visualizations pane right here. And just let me go ahead and zoom in just to show you where this is. We're gonna go into the visualizations bucket right here and choose the line chart. Pretty basic. Go ahead and choose that. Let's drill ourselves back out or zoom out, I should say. And let's just go ahead and put the line chart roughly here inside of the actual canvas. So let's get it lined up like that. All right. So now we're ready to start binding some data into this actual visualization. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to just open my fields pane up a little bit more and ensure the visual still is focus. I'm gonna click on order date. And what I want to do here is I actually want to take the entire order date hierarchy from this field here. So I'm gonna take this and drag it over into the axes. And what this is going to do is set us up for a subsequent sub lesson where we start talking about drilling down on our information. So we're gonna take advantage of the hierarchies that we created back in a previous lesson to allow people to roll up and roll down from days to months to years, and from years down to months down to days based on how they want to view their data. Okay, so that's the first piece there. So let's then go ahead and go over to our sales table. So I'm gonna open up the sales table. I'm then going to bring my total sales once again into my values pane right here. So let's go ahead and do that. And now we can see that we have our sales line chart being drawn out, like so. Okay, so the last things that we're gonna do on this line chart here is we're just gonna go ahead and format. So once again, make sure that has the proper focus. I'm gonna go to the visualizations pane under format, click on that right there. What we'll do first here is let's go into the general card and get things positioned where we want them. So let's just make this 41. So let's go ahead and do that. The Y position, we want to make 246 like that. The width we're gonna go ahead and say 585, like so. And finally with the height, we're going to say 407. So let's go ahead and do that. Get our visual position where we want. So that looks good. What we want to do here next is we are going to go into our title card. So let's go down to title and, scroll into here. And actually let's give this a completely different title. Let's just call this sales performance. Yeah, something like this here. So sales performance, like so. Go ahead and enter. And once again, just following our standards from before, let's go ahead and put that in the center and make sure we've got a 14 point font and a black background. Perfect. So now we've got our visuals actually looking pretty darn good here. Actually nice and consistent. Clean, appealing, following the backgrounds and using our theme files to give things a consistent color. Okay, so that really takes us to the end of this particular sub lesson. What we want to do is just focus on building the line chart out itself first. This time we're gonna actually leave the titles on for the X and Y axis, versus what we did in previous sub lessons where we went ahead and turned them off. And what we're gonna take a look at in the next sub lesson, is how to use drill down on this line chart.