Categories: Power BI

Where’s the Trend Line in Power BI Desktop?

A quick blog post on finding where the trend line is hiding in Power BI Desktop. Docs will state it is in the analytics pane for certain types of visualization. However, it doesn’t always show up:

(I really resisted the urge to post another “Dude, where is my car” image)

So why did the trend line disappear? Turns out the X-axis needs to be continuous, not categorical. You can change this in the properties of the X-axis:

However, still no trend line. This was caused by the effect that the attribute Year in my model had a string data type, and not integer (because why would I want to aggregate years?). Once I changed it to whole number in the query editor, my problem was solved:

(Still no percentile line though…)

This restriction of “continuous and numerical” means you can’t for example use a Year-Month column (e.g. 2017-06). I hope they solve this soon.


------------------------------------------------
Do you like this blog post? You can thank me by buying me a beer 🙂
Koen Verbeeck

Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at AE, helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.

View Comments

    • I'm not sure what you mean. I think you can have a trend line when you have a date hierarchy and you drill down to months? I'd have to test it out.

  • "Once I changed it to whole number in the query editor, my problem was solved:" Can you give a screenshot of how to do this? I only see the options to change the entire field's data type, not just the year attribute. Thanks!

    • What do you mean with the "entire field"?
      Do you have a auto-created data hierarchy?

  • One other issue I found is that the trend lines goes when there is no data on the chart. Let's say I have a chart with months the my data starts in March and continues to the rest of the year. The trend line starts at January even though there is no data for January and February. I do not want it and want the line to start at March. Do not see any setting for that.

Recent Posts

Book Review – Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices

I was asked to do a review of the book Microsoft Power BI Performance Best…

3 days ago

Create a Numbers Table in Power Query

This is a quick blog post, mainly so I have the code available if I…

1 week ago

Microsoft finally adds Tenant Switcher for Fabric / Power BI

Praise whatever deity you believe in, because it's finally here, a tenant switcher for Microsoft…

1 week ago

Book Review – Humanizing Data Strategy by Tiankai Feng

This book was making its rounds on social media, and the concept seems interesting enough…

1 week ago

Free webinar – Tackling the Gaps and Islands Problem with T-SQL Window Functions

I'm hosting a free webinar at MSSQLTips.com at the 19th of December 2024, 6PM UTC.…

3 weeks ago

dataMinds Connect 2024 – Session Materials

The slides and scripts for my session "Tackling the Gaps & Islands Problem with T-SQL…

1 month ago