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GilesWalker's avatar
GilesWalker
Skilled Sharer
10 years ago
Solved

Plotting times on a graph

Hi Everyone,   I have a dataset with a column containing the date and time. I have changed the format to show the data as HH:MM. I am trying to plot this on a line graph visual, however I cant seem...
Need Help
  • mike_honey's avatar
    mike_honey
    10 years ago

    Starting from a single Date column, I would follow these steps:

    1. Using Power Bi Designer: Home / Edit Queries / select your Query
    2. Add a "Date" column - select your Date column, Add Column / Date / Date only
    3. Add an "Hour" column - select your Date column, Add Column / Time / Hour
    4. Add an "Minute" column - select your Date column, Add Column / Time / Minute
    5. calculate a "Hour Decimal" column in the Query Layer - Add Column / Add Custom Column / Hour Decimal = [Hour] + ( [Minute] / 60 ). So 3:15pm would become 15.25.
    6. Set the data type of the new "Hour Decimal" column  - Home / Data Type: Decimal Number
    7. Close & Apply
    8. Navigate to Data view, choose your table, choose the "Hour Decimal" column, navigate to Modeling and set Default Summarization: Minimum (depends on your requirements - this will show the first Time for each Day. You can customize this for each Visual).
    9. Navigate to the Report view, select your Line graph Visual, set the Axis to be the new "Date" field, and the Value to the new "Hour Decimal" field.

    Now the Y-axis shows the Time portion of each date, from 0 - 24.

     

    While figuring this out, I've built a working solution which you can download from my OneDrive and try out:

     

    http://1drv.ms/1AzPAZp

     

    It's the file: Power BI demo - Line chart of date vs time.pibx

     

    The data is a random sample but hopefully it helps show the steps.

WillT's avatar
WillT
Community Admin
10 years ago

Hi Giles. I'm not sure I follow you exactly. Your data is formatted something like this, right?

Date      Time

1/1/2016  12:34

1/2/2016  10:15

1/3/2016  19:25

 

And you want to show a line graph with dates along the X axis. Are you asking for the time to determine the height the line appears on the Y axis? So with my sample data, the value for 1/1 would be 12:34, 1/2 would be 10:15 etc? At the moment there's no automatic way to get Power BI to display time as Y-axis values, but you could convert the time values to a number and put that into the 'Values' box in the field well. You can convert it to the number of minutes past midnight by:

= HOUR([Time])*60 + MINUTE([Time])

 

Does that help? Maybe I've misunderstood your question...