Timeline visual

[mpovey]

The timeline custom visual is great, but

• It would be better if you were able to set a default value, ie Period - Year, Value - 2015
• It would be good to see it animate over a given period alongside a scatter chart for instance

[AGo]

Not working for me with a normal yyyy-MM-dd column. Any suggestions? Please give me a hand

[pmdci]

To be honest I found the timeline visual to be quite poor, and it didn't pass any of my QA tests. A few points:

• The visual is quite clunky as a filter selection resets to default after clicking on more than one chart. For example I select year 2015 then click on a bar of a chart. So far so good. If I click on another bar of this or another chart, the timeline slicer resets to default. I understand this is by design due to the way that Power BI visuals work, but it is quite inconvenient for users.

• The slicer is way to big (in height). I compare it with the slicer in Excel and I see no reason as to why there is so much fixed blank space at the top of it.

• We should be able to configure the position of the hierarchy dropdown (select for Y,Q,M,D), header, etc.

• Not being able to use custom date hierarchies is also a big downer. I might want to add Week Number into my date slicer and remove Quarters, for example.

• As mentioned by @mpovey, we should be able to specify the default start date. I would be great if we could specify the current data for example, or some sort of dax calculation to specify the current year, month, etc.

• Drill-down is clunky. When we select a period (e.g. a year) and then drills down to quarter or month, it the visual should zoom into the start of the period, but it shows the begining of the time dimension instead. For example I have a time dimension that goes from 2012 to 2030. If I select year 2017 and then drill down to quarters, the view starts from quarters in year 2012. I have to actually scroll to 2017 in order to see the selection.

• The slicer is quite slow to respond, particularly when dealing with days. It also says that it does not show all the data due to "too many values". Quite unfortunate since this works fine with Excel slicers. As a workaround, we should be allowed to add a filter into the slicer (e.g. only 10 years).

[pjjfmarques]

Other issue I found is related to the dates selected.

I think that when we select a month the filter will work for the period selectd, for example If I select April 2016 the filter should select from the 1 st of April until the last day of april, but in reality the filter works from the 1st day of the month until the first day of the month that follow the selection (inclusive)... 

That should be an error!!!

[AndyTrezise]

Agree with your comments....it's a shame as in concept it's a great visual (in pratical terms) but needs more work to make it fit with others already available.

Too big.

Filter resets after clicking on another visual.

Clunky in operation.

Hope improvements are made soon.

[GTR]

• I believe you can set a default value to your date column by setting it to (ie. 2015) via the report filter setting which predefines a filter in a report. This way, the timeline slicer can be used to change the date from the default 2015. Hope this helps.
• I would also like to request the "play axis" feature that exists in Excel which brings animation in a scatter chart showing a live trend of your data.

[karinmeier]

Visual level filters don't work for me in either Power BI Desktop or Web versions. When I drag a column name over the 'Drag data fields here' box, the box outline lights up yellow, but the column name doesn't stick. It's possible to set the Page level filter, but that doesn't affect the range in the visual.

Has anyone been able to make the Visual level filter work?

[KHorseman]

Are you sure you're dragging a column and not a measure? There is a difference between the two.

[Enrico]

Had the same problem. Whant to show only realtime data comming from Azure Event Hub via Stream Analytics to Power BI. The timeline show all data that comes in, but I whant only see the data from the last 2 hours. How can I do this? I'm not using the Desktop version, only the web app. And theres no option to use the filter settings from an report, because you can set only a fix date.