Jeffrey Weir on 07 Dec 2019 06:13:58
Charts that use a numerical field on the X axis allow you to change the axis type from 'Categorical' to 'Continuous', meaning you can see ALL the data in one go, without having to scroll. Tooltips give all the information pertinent to the x axis for a point on hover over.
Unfortunately this option isn't available for a text-based axis, such as Customer Name or Country...and this is problematic if you want to be able to get a handle on the distribution of a text field by some ranked numerical measure. Or put another way, you have no way of knowing whether the distribution has a long tail, and can't see the 'head' of that distribution relative to the 'tail'.
I've seen many PowerBI graphs stretched practically all the way across the canvas to try to show as much of the distribution as possible, but this often still only shows a small percentage of the category in one view, and is a criminal waste of space.
I would like to be able to select the 'continous' option for text fields on an axis. Excel does this automatically...it just shows every nth label, and you can either then kill the x axis (because you don't care about the actual x axis text but rather the shape of the distribution) or get the X axis value from hovering over the series.
Likewise, I would like to be able to select 'Continuous' in PowerBI, and either have Power BI plot as many x axis labels dynamically as will fit (as it does with data labels) or have it simply turn the actual X axis labeling off and let people get the x value from a tooltip if they actually want it.
This is related to this Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/InsightsMachine/status/1203060496909262849