How to format a Line Chart in Power BI

This post is about how to implement basic formatting in a Line Chart in Power BI.


When I say “basic” formatting, I mean what you should do EVERY time you build a Line Chart to make it as easy for your users to understand.

For this post (and video) we’re going to start with the Power BI file from the “How to make a Line Chart” post. It already has a simple Line Chart made, and we’re going to format it.

You can download a copy of the .pbix file if you want to do it along with me here.

The data the Power BI file connects to is the same data as in the “How to make a Line Chart” post. If you want your own copy of it, you can download it here:

Here’s the video version of this post. Below the video are written instructions.

Here’s the Line Chart we’re going to work with. It’s what Power BI gives us when we give a Line Chart visual something to count (Participants) on the Y-Axis and put a field like Years on the X-Axis so we can see our data over time.

We also have our Program field in our Legend box on the Visualization Pane and that splits our count into lines for each Program.

It’s functional, but could be SO much better. Here are the essential formatting tweaks you should do to EVERY Line Chart.

A good title that expresses the message of your chart

The first thing we need to format here is our title, so we can be really clear to our viewers what our Line Chart is about. The title is the most important part of any chart. You want to have a descriptive title that describes what your chart is about and ideally what the main key takeaway is.

This way, even if your chart is hard to understand (but let’s make sure it isn’t!) your viewers will still get the point.

Delete the awful default title Power BI gave the chart and write out a better one that describes your data. Make it bigger and more visible. People need to see it. Always left align your title and keep it at the top. Our brains and eyes in the western world are programmed to start reading content at the upper-left.

We adjust our title by making sure our bar chart is selected and then going into the Formatting options in our Visualization Pane. In there, we’ll go into the General section and open up the Title section. We can type in our new title there, using regular language. We can use “Program Participant numbers have decreased since hitting a high in 2021.” We can increase our title font and bold it and make our title a dark gray font. We can also make the font Segoe UI so it matches our Axis fonts.

Clean up those Axes

Cleaning up our Axes is also an essential but often overlooked formatting task. The most important thing to do here is get rid of our Axis Titles.

It’s already plainly evident that our X-Axis has years on it, and we don’t need our Y-Axis titled “Sum of Participants” as it’s already clear from our title that this chart is about participants.

That’s the sign of a good title, you don’t need to explain what data your chart is using.

In the X-Axis and Y-Axis formatting tools in our Visualizations Pane, there are on/off switches for out Axis titles. We’ll switch both of them to off.

We’ll also increase the font sizes for our Axes fonts, and make them the same dark grey color as our title. These Axis font options are in the Values sections of the Axis formatting

.Do you notice something about the Y-Axis? It’s not starting at 0, but at 10.

Power BI is starting our Axis at 10 as it’s just below the lowest value in our data.

There are arguments both for and against having a non-zero starting point for a Y-Axis, but for this example, we’re going to make Y-Axis minimum 0.

To do this, go into the Range section of the Y-Axis formatting options and type in a 0.

Adjust those Gridlines

The last thing we’re going to do is adjust our gridlines a bit. There’s a Gridlines section in our Formatting options, and in there are options for formatting both our horizontal and vertical gridlines.

First, we’re going to turn our vertical gridlines right off. We don’t need them. Our viewers can see the trend over time of our lines really easily so we don’t need the clutter of vertical lines.

However, we want to make our horizontal lines a bit more visible. These lines help our viewers tie the points on our lines to a value on the Y-Axis. The lines guide their eyes across the data.

There are already some very light grey dotted lines there. We’re going to make them solid and a slightly darker grey. But not too dark. We want these lines to be an aide, not take away attention from the data lines.

Now we know 3 essential ways to make your Power BI Line Charts not only better, but *easier* for your Power BI report users.

Take care,

Joe.

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