What is new in the April 2018 Power BI Desktop update
Part four of a six-part series of blogs

This month's update allows users to add customisable buttons to a report, incorporates a numeric slicer and includes a few other smaller changes.

  1. New features in the April 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
  2. Action buttons
  3. Numeric slicers
  4. Changing the line and marker style for combination charts (this blog)
  5. Choose your organisational custom visuals
  6. Features still in preview as of April 2018

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog.  Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.

Posted by Andy Brown on 07 April 2018

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Changing the line and marker style for combination charts

Previous updates allowed you to change the line and marker style for normal line charts; you can now change these properties for combination charts too:

Example of combination chart

An example of a combination chart with a formatted line.

To achieve this effect, I changed 3 settings: Data colors, Shapes and Legend.

Data colour settings

The first thing to do for the chart above was to change the colour used to display the average price line:

Data colour for line

Nothing new here: you've been able to colour lines for many moons!

 

Shape settings

The next thing I changed was the line size and type, and the marker settings:

Marker settings

I've gone for a 3-pixel dotted line, with large purple markers showing as X's. 

 

Legend settings

My final change was to make sure that the legend shows the line type used:

Legend settings

Setting the legend style to Line and marker means that the legend displays the line colour and style as well as the marker colour, style and size.

 

Here's what the legend will now show:

Final legend

I've increased the font a bit to make it clearer.

 

 

And that's all there is to say about this very small update!

  1. New features in the April 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
  2. Action buttons
  3. Numeric slicers
  4. Changing the line and marker style for combination charts (this blog)
  5. Choose your organisational custom visuals
  6. Features still in preview as of April 2018
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