Don’t make the mistake of going with the standard settings in the Power BI Core Visuals column chart. Here’s how to level up your column chart game with 3 easy steps.
The standard column chart in Power BI doesn’t look too amazing unless you get a bit jiggy with the settings.
As you can see in this example.
😡 Columns can overlap the data labels.
😡 Its’ generally not a very good-looking chart.
Three basic steps that we can take to transform the chart are
- The Columns:
Transparency: make the columns about 85% transparent.
Border: turn on the border for the columns, make the width 2px.
Layout: increase the space between the columns, this chart is 32% but that will depend on how dense your columns are. - Y axis Max: use error bars for a quick and easy y axis max trick (see my longer post about this here.)
- Colours: Picking colours isn’t easy and is influenced by a whole lot of things. I did a longer post on colours here.
Thankfully, visual calcs make it easy to get the hex codes for any min and max values you want to highlight. You’ll need to format the hex codes as text under ‘general’ data format before you can use them as conditional formatting.
Here’s my Visual Calc code I used in this chart here:
Max and Min = // max VAR __max = EXPANDALL ( MAXX ( ROWS, [Revenue] ), ROWS ) //min VAR __min = EXPANDALL ( MINX ( ROWS, [Revenue] ), ROWS ) VAR __result = SWITCH ( TRUE (), [Revenue] = __min, "#ae2012", [Revenue] = __max, "#005f73", "#001219" ) RETURN __result