New scaling options for bubble charts

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Changes in the August 2023 Power BI Desktop Update Part three of a three-part series of blogs
A holiday season update with only two small changes: new icons to switch between mobile and normal layout, and a new scaling option for bubble charts (surely on-object formatting will go live soon?). A summary of the August 2023 update changes You can switch more easily between mobile and desktop layout New scaling options for bubble charts (this blog) We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Changes in the August 2023 Power BI Desktop Update

Part three of a three-part series of blogs

A holiday season update with only two small changes: new icons to switch between mobile and normal layout, and a new scaling option for bubble charts (surely on-object formatting will go live soon?).

A summary of the August 2023 update changes
You can switch more easily between mobile and desktop layout
New scaling options for bubble charts (this blog)

We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 August 2023

I suspect this blog will be a contender for the one which has the highest authorship-to-readership ratio on this website. This is a small change, but sadly it takes a bit of explanation to understand it!

Here's a bubble chart comparing the average size of shopping centres against the average number of units that each contains for 4 different shopping centre types:

Crucially, the size of the bubble represents how many transactions there were in each centre.

Here are the field well settings for this chart:

The bubble size is given by the number of purchases.

Here are the number of transactions for each centre type:

The number of factory outlet transactions is dwarfed by the number of shopping centre purchases.

Here are the scaling options for the above chart:

For this chart I selected Magnitude.

So finally ... here's what the Range scaling options mean!

Option	What it means
Magnitude	The size of the bubbles correlates with the number each represents (so for example the Shopping Park bubble in our chart is rougly twice the size of the Factory Outlet bubble because this centre type has roughly twice the number of sales).
Data range	Power BI creates a scale from the smallest number represented up to the largest (see below for an example of what this would look like for our example).
Auto	Choose the best scaling option for the data being represented (for our example Power BI chooses Magnitude for this).

So if you choose Data range for your scaling option, here's what you get:

The size of the Factory Outlet bubble (shown boxed above) is tiny because this is now the starting point for our data scale.

Note that you could also handle this problem by creating a measure to recalibrate the bubbles by subtracting the minimum value of the number of transactions from each centre type's number of sales figure.

Parts of this blog
A summary of the August 2023 update changes You can switch more easily between mobile and desktop layout New scaling options for bubble charts (this blog)

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

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