2022 Week 01 | Power BI: Sparklines!

Introduction

Welcome back to another year of Power BI #WorkoutWednesday! We hope you enjoy the challenges that we are going to present you this year. To get this year started off right, this week’s challenge will be introducing you to a feature that was released in the December 2021 Power BI Desktop release, sparklines.

I’ve seen this feature being requested for a while, so I’m excited that Power BI is now including them in their standard visuals. You can read more about them at this link to the Microsoft information page. 

In this week’s challenge, we are going to create a report using the sparklines in table and matrix visuals. I have created a sample report below showing the new sparklines. 

Requirements

  • Download the data file from the link, here. We are just using the Orders table in this challenge
  • Make sure you have the December 2021 Power BI Desktop release (or later) installed
  • Make sure that Sparklines are turned on in your Preview Features
    •  File -> Options and Settings -> Options -> Preview Features -> Sparklines
  • Create four different tables that feature sparklines
    1. Make a table that includes at least one field. In my example I used Category and Segment. Create a sparkline that shows Sales by Month of Order Date
    2. Using the same table created in step one, format the sparkline by changing the Data color as well as where you show the markers. Change the stroke width as well
    3.  Using the table created in step 2, transition the spark lines to columns. This will show the spark lines as bars instead of a line chart.
    4. Create a matrix that has one field as the Rows and one as Category, the fields you use are up to you. Create two different Sales sparklines, one by Order Date and the other by Ship Date. Make one of them a line and the other a column chart. Make sure to add in some formatting on both sparklines. 

Dataset

This week you can find the data here. The data model should already be complete, all you need to do is complete the visual per the requirements above. 

Share

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtags #WOW2022 and #PowerBI, and tag @JSBaucke@MMarie, @shan_gsd, @KerryKolosko, and @NerdyWithData. 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

3 thoughts on “2022 Week 01 | Power BI: Sparklines!”

  1. I’m not sure if anyone else ran into this but using the Data.World connector using:
    Owner: jbaucke
    Dataset ID: super-store-data-model
    Query: SELECT * FROM orders

    Led to the following error: We encountered an error while trying to connect. Ambiguous table name ‘Orders….

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