Introduction
Welcome back to Workout Wednesday! This week we’re creating a dynamic annotation slicer that highlights specific data points on a time series chart.
Imagine you’re presenting monthly revenue trends to stakeholders who want to quickly assess performance against the typical baseline. Instead of manually pointing out values, you create an interactive chart where users can select any month and instantly see how it compares to the median – complete with the percentage variance displayed right on the chart.
The annotation displays the selected month’s value, compares it to the overall median, and shows the percentage difference – all updating dynamically based on your selection.
Want to learn how to build interactive annotations with numeric parameters? Let’s do it!
Requirements
Download the sample data from data.world. [Note: Data.World requires you to create a free account to access the data, please sign in to see and download it.]
1. Create a numeric parameter for month selection from 202410 to 202509 (unfortunately the numeric parameter cannot be a text or date value).
2. Make sure you have a proper date dimension table with a year-month column.
3. Build a line chart showing revenue over time with a median reference line.
4. Create a measure that highlights only the selected month’s value.
5. Create a dynamic data label showing: value, median comparison, and relative difference.
6. This is it: you can select a month and display the annotation and label only for the higlighted month.
Dataset
This week’s dataset is downloadable from data.world here.
Share
After you finish your workout, share on Bluesky or LinkedIn using the hashtags #WOW2025 and #PowerBI, and tag @MMarie, @shan_gsd, and me Diana. Also make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year.
Solution
Find the how-to video here.
And here is the pbix file: Download