Forum Discussion
Advocate IWrong bubble size in Scatter chart
Hello
I don't know how the size of each bubble is calculated, but there seems to be an automatic 'rescaling' which doesn't seem right to me. The area of the bubble is obviously not directly proportional to the 'size' value.
Example:
I have products A, B & C with size 1; 1,000; and 1,000,000 respectively. If on my scatter chart I display only A & B, the vizualisation will be the exact same as plotting A & C. I think in the 2nd scenario we should clearly see that C is way bigger compared to A than what is B compared to A.
It is common practice to have the area of the bubble be directly proportional to the value it represents. Otherwise this can lead to confusion and misinterpretation.
By the way, I love Power BI !
6 Replies
v-yulgu-msftMicrosoft Employee
Hi T3chNick,
In my test, I could reproduce your scenario. Actually, the bubble size displayed in scatter chart will automatically adjust the size of chart visual. So, there existing some difference between its real size and displayed size. Personally, I would suggest you submit your idea at this page, if it is mentioned by many users, our product team will consider improving this behavior in later release.
Best regards,
Yuliana Gu
T3chNickThank you for your response.
I've just added this as an idea : https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/19356538-display-the-real-proportional-size-of-bubbles
There are many interesting ideas on sizes of bubbles, but couldn't find one similar to this. I hope some kind of rich "pack" regrouping these ideas would be considered for implementation.
Hi,
I had similar issue and found the issue is due to negative numbers in the column which is used in size of bubble. We can convert negative numbers to zero and bubble sizes comes up relatively.
Hi,
It could be due to negative numbers present in column which is used for bubble size. Try converting negative numbers to zero in formula , IF(column_value<0,0,column_value).
- T3chNick
Hi karthick,
Thanks for your input. But this is not due to negative numbers, I've given an example in my first post.
Here's the table you could manually input for testing purposes :
Letter Size Order A 1 1 B 10 2 C 1000 3 D 1000000 4 E 10000000000 5 Then add 'Letter' as a legend, 'Order' as Y axis and 'Size' as size. Add a slicer on the letters and play with it. If you display them all, only E will be bigger, and then A=B=C=D (visually in size) and that is just wrong.
arelf27Helper II
I see this was posted a year ago...but doesn't look like there's a resolution.. By accident, I made this work in my graph, so hopefully will help others:
I had the same issue: all of my scatter chart bubbles were the exact same size (even though I added a value field to Size property that had different values in it...) However, pocking around under Analytics tab, I discovered that I had Ratio line set to dotted... I removed that thinking I didn't particularly cared for that look and didn't really understand what Ratio line meant in this context.. However, to my big surprise, the size of my bubbles changed immediately, so now they are all different sizes, reflective of the field in the size property...
