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.

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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.

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View Comments

sandeep says:

May 29, 2018 at 3:48 pm

can you show the trend line year and month wise
- Koen Verbeeck says:
  
  May 30, 2018 at 10:58 am
  
  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.
  - Nagen Samal says:
    
    July 19, 2024 at 9:08 am
    
    Didn't get your point at all. Can you tell me in very simple terms which line is the trend line? The green or the black dotted one?
    - Koen Verbeeck says:
      
      July 24, 2024 at 10:52 am
      
      The black dotted one.
Liz Amador says:

June 7, 2018 at 8:23 pm

"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!
- Koen Verbeeck says:
  
  June 8, 2018 at 8:15 am
  
  What do you mean with the "entire field"?
  Do you have a auto-created data hierarchy?
Stan says:

October 16, 2019 at 4:14 pm

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.