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Hello. New to the community and Power BI here, so go easy on me 🙂
I have a dataset which has amongst other things, 12 profit columns named GPApr18, GPMay18, GPJun18 etc. These columns contain £ values. I want to create a graph showing £ values over those 12 months. but I am running into a problem with Axis and the way the graph is being displayed. This is what the graph currently looks like, and this is the visualisation.
I'm aware I don't have an Axis, and that ALL of the months are in the Value section, but when I experiment with them, the graph just displays wrong. I need to have 12 months at the bottom, with the GP for that month as the Y axis. ANy help would be appreciated.
I've experienced similar issues with date grouping.
Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you. But I do have a guiding thought to consider. The data that you put in the values section is obviously a currency value. I can also see that the label for each of the columns those values are contained are named with the month and year that they correspond with.
What I can tell you is this: Most programs, and I can imagine this applies the same to Power BI, would not be able to identify what date construct those values belong to without an actual date value to correspond them with. I can almost surely guarantee you that Power BI cannot read your column headers and parse the information out to something more generalized. What I mean is that Power BI cannot look at "Mar18" and determine that the reference is to March, 2018 (even if the program did have that capability, how could it know that your referring to March, 2018 when you could just as easily be referring to March, 18th, XXXX).
In essence, what I am trying to tell you is that for what you want, you're most likely going to need a separate column in your data that identifies the month and year in a date format. In essence, instead of having twelve different columns for the profit for each month, you would have one column labeled Date and one column labeled Profit Amount. The values in date would be (January, 2018, February, 2018, etc.) and it would be important to make sure they are formatted as date value type (you can think of when you're using Excel and you use the drop-down to select Currency or Accounting or Short Date). Then, of course, you would have the other column including the values you already have for each month.
By doing this, you would be able to pull the 'Date' column into the X-Axis and the Profit Amount into the Y-Axis. Now that I think about it, if you are only tracking one year, you could call the date column 'Month' rather than 'Date' and just write the name of the month for each value. If you did this, you wouldn't even need to format the values into a date format. Your X-Axis would just display the different text values not even caring whether they are dates or not.
Possible solutions to consider. My personal issue is when you have more than one years worth of data to display. It becomes quite difficult as Power BI does not offer a simple and friendly solution to split months by years (I hope this is something they aim to improve).
Thank you for the comprehensive response and I will look into your suggestions.
On the face of it, the dataset (which is in SQL as an import from a bunch of XL sheets), is 1200 rows for 30+ sales guys, each row with 12 x monthly profit forecasts. Not sure how I would go about replacing this with a Month field and a Profit field (or even if I could, since that is the way we record the data and its a massive undertaking to change it), but I will have a look into what can be done.
The data looks like this
Opportunity Name GPApr18 GPMay18 GPJun18
Example 1 18,000 12,000 8,500
Example 2 9,000 10,000 1,525
Example 1000+ 7,000 6,000 7,000
I agree that Power BI doesn't know they are date fields. On my other visualisations, I can create annual graphs, as the axis is based on Month. Not sure how I could use the Desktop version of Power BI to inetrrogate the data or change or reassociate the values. Wil come back to this tomorrow night, but for the moment this had beaten me..
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