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Using a Continuous Axis for Date Tables in Power BI

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari gussy up a visual:

In a previous article, Creating a simpler and chart-friendly Date table in Power BI, we showed you how to create a Date table you can use in a line chart with a continuous X-axis instead of a categorical one, even when the granularity is the month rather than the day. That technique stores every level as a DateTime column and relies on custom format strings to display the month name.

The auto date/time feature in Power BI provides the same user experience using a different technique. Its hidden date table uses text columns for quarters and months, sorted by a numeric column. However, the line chart still offers a continuous X-axis when you drill down to the month level. We keep saying that auto date/time is not a best practice, but this behavior is useful. Can we obtain it with our own Date table? Yes, we can.

If you have a Date table in your model (as you should!), this article explains how to enable the continuous X-axis in your report when the user groups dates by year, quarter, month, or week.

Click through to see how it looks, as well as how it works.

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