Power BI Desktop updates for June 2025

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Power BI Desktop updates for June 2025
The big new feature this month is the release of sparklines from preview - this blog takes them for a spin

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 July 2025

In this blog

Creating sparklines
Editing sparklines
Formatting sparklines
Formatting markers
Showing tooltips for sparklines
And finally - some sparkline oddities

The only significant update to Power BI Desktop for report creators this month is the emergence of sparklines from preview (where they have been languishing for well over 3 years):

Sparklines can show as either lines or columns.

The rest of this blog shows how to create, format and tinker with sparklines to create effects like the ones shown above.

Creating sparklines

Sparklines are attached to a column in a table:

What the "field well" looks like for the sparklines above.

This means that to create them you just right-click on the data field to which you want to attach a sparkline:

The option to add a sparkline to the Sales field. This menu only appears for numeric data.

You must now tell Power BI how it should calculate sparklines:

Here we're going to show the total quantity sold for each payment date month.

There's also an option below this to specify how sparklines should work with calculation groups, but since few people will use this complicated and (in our opinion) unnecessary feature I'm not going to cover this here. For most purposes you can ignore this final drop down.

Editing sparklines

To change the data settings for a sparkline, right-click on the relevant data field and choose to edit the sparkline:

Choose this option to make changes (this will then redisplay the dialog box shown above).

Formatting sparklines

You can format sparklines on the Sparklines card:

The card for making changes to the appearance of sparklines.

If you have more than one sparkline attached to a data column, you can choose which one you want to format:

Here I'm going to format the first sparkline shown at the top of this page.

Choose whether to show the data as a line or as columns:

I chose Line for the first sparkline above (by month) and Column for the second (by quarter).

You can then choose the colour and (for lines) width of your lines:

The example at the top of this page uses a 2 pixel red line.

Formatting markers

You can choose a range of options for markers:

The default option of Isolated will just apply markers to data points which aren't connected to any others (otherwise you wouldn't be able to see that they existed).

Here are some other examples of options you could choose:

Marker option	What it would show for our example
Every point
Highest and Lowest
First and Last

Showing tooltips for sparklines

One of the best things about sparklines is what happens if you turn tooltips on for the containing table:

This is how to turn tooltips on for a visual.

This gives a really useful tooltip!

An example of a sparkline tooltip.

And finally - some sparkline oddities

You can sort by a sparkline column, but all that this does is to sort by the numeric column to which the sparkline is attached:

Here I've sorted by the Sales by quarter sparkline column, but this has just sorted by the Sales column data.

In a perfect world Microsoft would disable the sort feature for sparkline columns!

Weirdly, you can't create visual calculations for tables contaning sparklines, presumably because it would be too hard to know how to deal with them:

The icon to create a new visual calculation is disabled.

And finally, there doesn't seem to be any easy way to hide sparklines from a total row:

These sparklines look odd, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to hide them.

If anyone knows otherwise, please do let us know!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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