Creating a more readable line chart with millions of records

[Surfacescan]

Hello - I need some help figuring a way to simplify my line charts.

I have over 2 Million calls over 6 weeks.  I want to show a running total of the times in each call someone listens to messages.  I can get it to look perfect when I am applying a Date hierarchy at the "day" level. See below.

However, I'm aware that since the dates of the calls is more than one month, the chart is not displaying in a meaningful way anymore.  What I want is the simplicity of these line charts showing a running total.  It can aggregate to the day. That would be great.  See below what happens when I just let the date column be used without any hierarchy.  Way too much detail.

Can someone suggest a way to get the effect from above but show more than one month at a time.  What is the easiest way to achieve this?

So far all this data is since March 13th.

I have 3,675,098 rows

[TomMartens · Accepted solution]

Hey @Surfacescan ,

I have to admit that I do not fully understand what you are asking for.

Because to the title of this thread, you have to be aware, that it's simply not possible to"draw" millions of data points in a visual, as there are limits of the number of possible data points: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/power-bi-data-points.

But, of course this is not as limiting as one might think at the first moment (even if it sometimes is):

If there are 15 countries, it would be possible to visualize 100 months assuming a data point limit of 1500.

If you are asking how to create a running total, I recommend reading this article, more or less everything related to date/time calculations is covered here (the running total): https://www.daxpatterns.com/time-patterns/

For the chart below I'm using the dot plot, but  I'm using a "categorical" variable for the x-axis.

Hopefully, this provides what you are looking for, at least it provides some ideas to tackle your challenge!

Regards,

Tom

[Surfacescan]

Thanks for the pointers.  It turns out that I was doing the right thing and that the problem was I had a Date/Time field instead of a Date field - this was showing every single interaction rather than grouping by day.  

Thanks for the tips.