Forum Discussion
Trend Lines
Anonymous sure technically you can but it's ugly at best, and worthless if you're looking at more than one year. You have to set the x-axis to "continuous" for trendlines to work, so the chart will only show auto-generated increments on that axis rather than the actual quarters.
As you can see, Acme Inc. was doing really well in Quarter Zero of 2016, a major improvement over the nosedive they took in Quarter Five of 2015.
Not to mention how bad it would look even if you could see the individual quarters labeled on the x-axis.
If I labeled quarters like that in a report that my execs have to show to other people, they would start wondering what they pay me for. But labeling it this way disables the trendline feature anyway, so fortunately it isn't even an option.
Good thing there are ways of manually calculating trendlines, because this feature is still mostly useless.
Anonymous yes, I know is ugly and that it cannot be used as something that you can show to top management. And as well as all the facts that you have described below.
I've just wanted to show that Quarters (as numbers) is working and with quarter labels as we all know it is not working. Because of this issue our customer will not use Power BI vizualization, but Excel chart.
I am looking forward to solution of the issue.
Anonymous yeah I didn't mean to just turn my nose up at your idea. It's just frustrating because your suggestion highlights the fact that trendlines are a functional feature, but they are only half-implemented. Sometimes I'd rather the developers wait a little longer and release a more finished feature.
Anonymous - There have been some significant changes to the analytics in the August update, you might want to check again. Although you still need the X-Axis to be set to Continuous and not Categorical.
Can you just turn off the X-Axis and label it with text boxes the way that you want it to look? Something else to think about, you could pick a date for each quarter and have a calculated column to assign that date, so Q1 2015 could be 1/1/2016, Q2 could be 1/2/2016 and so on. Create your line chart using that date as your X-Axis. Now you can set it to continuous. Turn off the X-Axis so that it doesn't display. Create the labels that you want with text boxes.
Greg_Deckler text boxes could work for some cases, but they wouldn't help if you needed drilldown on a date hierarchy, and even if not you would still need to go in every quarter and rearrange the chart to add a new text box. But as a short-term solution it's not bad. Anyway my end users are picky about the height of tiles in their dashboards; labeling quarters in some style other than "Q1 2015" will definitely be met with "The report is fine. Fix the quarterly chart and we'll start using it."
As for the August update, I gather you're talking about the new Analytics Pane? Looks cool. It all seems to work even on a text axis, so that's progress. No trend option though. I just gave it a quick look though, so maybe I missed something. I'll have to check it out in more detail next week. I haven't had much of a chance to play around lately. I'm getting buried alive by this monster data model that they keep radically changing the requirements on. The relationship window is starting to look like a plate of spaghetti and it takes three minutes just to add a new measure. I'm scrapping it completely and starting over clean today. Oh look, the August update has auto-recovery. I could have used that a couple of days ago...
