More line formatting enhancements

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Power BI Desktop Update for May 2024 Part six of a seven-part series of blogs
This month's bigger than average update sees new pivot table style matrix layouts, the emergence of modern tooltips, calculation groups and the DAX query pane from preview and a couple of other smaller changes. Power BI Desktop Update for May 2024 Making matrices behave more like Excel pivot tables Modern tooltips are now turned on by default DAX query view has emerged from preview Model Explorer and Calculation Groups are now generally available More line formatting enhancements (this blog) A redesigned Manage Relationships window We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Power BI Desktop Update for May 2024

Part six of a seven-part series of blogs

This month's bigger than average update sees new pivot table style matrix layouts, the emergence of modern tooltips, calculation groups and the DAX query pane from preview and a couple of other smaller changes.

Power BI Desktop Update for May 2024
Making matrices behave more like Excel pivot tables
Modern tooltips are now turned on by default
DAX query view has emerged from preview
Model Explorer and Calculation Groups are now generally available
More line formatting enhancements (this blog)
A redesigned Manage Relationships window

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 04 June 2024

In this blog

You can hide individual lines
Line patterns
Dash cap styles

Following last month's improvements to line formatting in Power BI ... more line formatting enhancements!

You can hide individual lines

The top line showing sales for the Land environment in the chart below is a bit dominant:

You might want not to show this line.

You can now hide the line, without removing it:

Here we've chosen not to show this line.

However, this doesn't remove the line - it's still available for selection and visual interactions:

The line is still visible - you just can't see it!

I think this could be a useful thing to do, as sometimes you want to keep a line in a chart so that the scaling remains the same but not have the line appear (you used to have to do this by setting the line colour to be identical to the background colour).

Line patterns

You can specify the relationship between dots and dashes in lines in a chart:

An example showing how the default pattern of 5,5,0,5 would look (taken from Microsoft's blog on the subject).

Here's an example I created:

The line segments are doubling each time (so going from 10 to 20 to 40), but the gap remains at 10. There appears to be a limit of 4 settings (ie 8 numbers) that you can type in.

Here's what this would look like for a typical chart:

The Scale by width toggle "keeps your reports looking good no matter the pixel width of your custom line".

Dash cap styles

OK, this is getting silly. You can now specify the format of the ending of each dash:

We're talking the end of each dash: it's almost impossible to see the difference between the settings even if you expand the width of your dashes to 12 pixels.

For those who care enough to tweak this setting, here's how to do it:

The 3 settings available.

Apparently there are similar improvements in "reference lines, forecast lines, leader lines, small multiple gridlines, and the new card’s divider line", but since my readership has surely now dwindled to 0 I'm stopping here!

Parts of this blog
Power BI Desktop Update for May 2024 Making matrices behave more like Excel pivot tables Modern tooltips are now turned on by default DAX query view has emerged from preview Model Explorer and Calculation Groups are now generally available More line formatting enhancements (this blog) A redesigned Manage Relationships window