Forum Discussion
Trend Lines
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...
No problem, we're all crazy busy it seems. The trend line is there in the Analytics pane, but it only shows up if the x-axis is set to Continuous, sort of like before. And I completely agree that a hack of a solution is really no solution at all!!