Ed Hansberry riffs on the new sparkline functionality in Power BI:
This isn’t a tutorial on how to create sparklines as Microsoft has you covered there. What I want to discuss though is how Sparklines are impacted by the filter context in a visual. First though you need to enable this feature. It is in preview mode at launch, so go to File, Options, Options and Settings, and look for the Preview section. Click Sparklines, then close and restart Power BI Desktop.
In the visual above, I added the “Month” field to the Sparkline settings and that created an additional filter on the visual. Before I added the Sparkline, Year was the only filter affecting the numbers. By adding the month to the sparkline, shown below, it breaks out the Total Net Sales figure by month.But what if I don’t want the sparkline to be the full range of data. For example, I just want the sparkline to show the last 3 months of the year, so 3 data points, not 12.
Click through to see how it’d look as a measure and what you need to do to make sparklines look right.