Power BI Blog: Sparklines in Preview

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series. This week, we look at sparklines – coming into Preview with the latest Power BI update.

Sparklines come into Preview as part of this month’s update. Just like in Excel, sparklines are tiny charts shown within cells of a table or matrix that make it easy to compare a large number of trends quickly. You can use sparklines to show trends in a series of values, such as seasonal increases or decreases, economic cycles or to highlight maximum and / or minimum values.

With this Preview feature enabled, you may add sparklines to both your table and matrix visuals through the field well. Simply open up the context menu for one of your numeric fields and select ‘Add a sparkline’.

A dialog will appear to let you configure the details of your sparkline. The numeric field you started with will be pre-populated for the y-axis, but you are able to change both the field and ‘Summarization’ (sic) type if needed. You’ll also need to select a field, such as a date column, to use as the x-axis of the sparkline.

Once you click ‘Create’, your sparkline will be added to your table or matrix as a new column automatically.

You can always edit the sparkline’s properties through the ‘Edit sparkline’ option in the value’s context menu.

You can use the Sparklines card in the Formatting pane to modify the sparkline’s line and marker formatting. You’re also able to change the line colour and width, add markers for different value types (highest, first, last, etc.), and change the marker size, colour and shape.

This is also where you may change the chart type from a line to a column chart.

Power BI supports up to five sparklines per visual and will display up to 52 points per sparkline. For performance reasons, the maximum number of columns in a matrix will be limited to 20 when sparklines are on. Note that although sparklines will be supported on Azure AS, it is not supported in any current on-prem SSAS but should work with future SSAS releases.

Check back next week for more Power BI tips and tricks!