Power BI – How to Create a Time Series Chart?

These Power BI charts are useful for detecting patterns and trends in the data, such as seasonal fluctuations or long-term trends. They are commonly used in the fields like finance, economics, and engineering to analyze data. By examining the shape and direction of the line over time, analysts can gain insights into the behavior of the variable being measured and make informed decisions based on the data.

Create Power BI Time Series Chart

Time series charts in Power BI are a graphical representation of data points collected over a specific period. These charts represent the variation of a particular measure over time. Typically these charts are line charts consisting of two axes, namely

• X-axis (Horizontal axis): Represents the time increments.
• Y-axis(Vertical axis): Represents the variable of interest.

About Dataset used

To create a Time series chart let us consider sales_table data which contains sales information of products in INDIA by the customers from the years 2010 to 2023. The dataset for sales_table can be downloaded from here.

sales_sample_data

Steps to Create a Time Series Chart 

Step 1: Open the Power-Bi Desktop

Step 2: Start loading the data by clicking on Get data and selecting the Excel workbook from the drop-down

Get Data

Step 3: Now select the line chart from the visualization panel.

Line chart

Step 4: Now select X-axis and Y-axis for the line chart to visualize how the sales of India change with time. Here we are selecting the Date column on X-axis and the Sales column on Y-axis.

X and Y co-ordinates

Step 5: Now, you have created a time series chart.

Time-Series chart

Analyze Time Series Chart

We can analyze this Time Series Chart not only by Years we can filter this by using quarters, months, and dates according to our business use. 

To use this option click on the image(Time series chart you created earlier) and go to the filters section, there you can find the different filter options(Date-Day, Date-Month, Date-Quarter, Date-Year).

Filters

Here, we have combined the Time series charts for each quarter into a single image, so we can more easily analyze the sales behavior of the product over time. This allows us to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent when looking at each chart individually.

Analysis

As you can observe in 2012 Quarter 1 had high sales and there is a drastic decrease in sales in Quarter 2 and there is an increase in Quarter 3 and a decrease in Quarter 4. Here we can have some conclusion that at odd Quarters in 2012, there is an increase in sales when compared to even Quarters. By observing this Business people can analyze what makes a decrease in sales in even Quarters.