Stacked column chart with four variables/columns

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a table with the following configuration in my PBI:



I would like to plot a stacked column chart so that column Value will be in the Y-Axis(SUM) and columns StartTime, DeviceName and TestName will be on the X-Axis having DeviceName as "Colour". 

The idea is that TestName will be stacked up on the X-axis while having Value column being summed up on the Y-axis but also have StartTime on the X-axis so that I have a chronological order and Device name in the Color field so that DeviceName is identifiable in the chart. 

Any help will be immensely appreciated.  

[dm-p · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

If I understand correctly, you're looking for a solution like in this post? If so, there's still not a way to do this using core visuals.

Given the potential density of your data and variables, this is ultimately going to be difficult to perceive quickly and easily by users.

This challenge is typically solved using one of the categories as a facet. This is known as a trellis or small multiple and are an excellent visualisation technique. Unfortunately, Power BI does not support this natively.

There are some custom visuals that will produce small multiples. The following will produce bar/column charts with small multiples:

• Infographic Designer
• 3AG Systems - Column Chart With Small Multiples
• Stacked Column Chart by Akvelon
• Stacked Bar Chart by Akvelon
• Zebra BI Charts (commercial)
• Ultimate Stacked (commercial)
• Multiple Axes Chart - XViz (commercial)

If you're confident that one of your variables doesn't need to be dynamic and has low cardinality, then you can make use of the techniques in this blog post by the Power BI team - essentially you create duplicates of the same visual, with a suitable filter on each.

Your sample data is a small window so I can't confirm how many unique values you'd get, but I'd consider using DeviceName as a candidate for each individual chart.

I appreciate that this doesn't specifically answer your question but might give you some ideas with how you can proceed.

Good luck!

Daniel

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[Anonymous]

Hey @dm-p, 

Thanks for the input! 

The visual output I'm looking for would be something within these lines:

But the one thing missing is that I would like to have thoses bars stacked up by DeviceName, which would result in having A1,A12,A7 values summed up and represented in one single bar. So the desired outcome in this scenario would be 3 bars instead of 9. Is that clear ? 

EDIT: The whole dataset is over 1000 rows. DeviceName has +50 unique values, same applies to TestName so unfortunately the technic you suggested would work in this case. 

Again, thanks for helping out 🙂