Overlay Charts w/ Different Dates

[ericOnline]

Hello, 

I have 7 Line Charts that I want to overlay on eachother to find patterns. The Values are all the same between charts but the Dates on the Axis are different. 

I need to be able to overlay different Dates. 

Example:

- Event 1: 6/10/18

    - Values: Temp. , Humidity, Dew Point, etc.

- Event 2: 7/14/18

    - Values: Temp. , Humidity, Dew Point, etc.

- Event N: 

    - Values: Same as above

How can I overlay these graphs when each has s different Date?

Thank you!

[dedelman_clng]

If the relationship, on a single date, between the various measurements is not important, you can have a chart of each type of measurement (temp, humidity, etc), using the date as the "legend".  Kind of like this, but you'd likely use "time" as your axis:

Hope this helps

David

[ericOnline]

Thanks for the idea @dedelman_clng. I'm not able to get your example working.

Here's what I have:

• All data combined in a single table (weather data and event data)
• There are two date columns in this table
  • WeatherDate: weather observations; recorded hourly
  • EventDate:  "events" that occurred; one-time per day
  • The goal is to find weather patterns that occurred leading up to, during, and after an "event".
• Line Chart visual
• Legend set to EventDate (each event)
• Values set to Temperature
  • Unfortunately, this gives me SUM of all Temperatures for each Event
    • I reaaaallly dislike this issue. It happens to me all the time in Power BI and I don't understand why values are SUMMED.
    • Why isn't there an option for "apply no calculation" in this case?
  • 
• Also, there is only one "slot" in Values. I want to compare multiple things (Temp, Humidity, etc.)
• Removed Temperature from Values and added it to Axis along with Humidity, etc.
• But now, without anything in Values, my Line Chart is just blank
• 
• Adding either EventDate or WeatherDate to Values results in a very strange chart that I can't make heads nor tails of. 
  • Here you can see Power BI auto COUNT the Value.
  • I don't know why this happens either and its another source of frustration. 
  • Why does Power BI apply a COUNT to the number of dates here?
• 

Can you see what I need to do differently here? Maybe a Scatter Chart instead? (Though I've tried and have the same SUM and COUNT issues there)

Thank you!

[dedelman_clng]

What you describe sounds more like a data science project than pure analytics.  What you want can be accomplished, but a lot of the heavy lifting will be preparation of the data.  Transforming data like turning time values into hours/minutes before or after the event. Normalizing values for temperature, humidity, etc so that they are on the same relative scale if charting on the same graph.

As far as PowerBI goes, yes, there can be some frustrations, but here are some of the basics to remember:

- While you can use PowerBI and make amazing visuals without creating measures, creating measures is more powerful and scalable, even if it is just SUM(Value).  PowerBI visuals are meant for measures, so visual charts that don't have some kind of aggregation don't make any sense to it (you can have unaggregated values in a table or matrix).  However, if your data is properly prepared, you'll find that SUM(Value) = MAX(Value) = MIN(Value) = Value when the visual is properly built.

- On a line chart:

   - "Axis" are the values shown on the X-axis.  If you have multiple different columns here, they are assumed to be in a hierarchy (like Year -> Month -> Day)

   - You can either put multiple columns/measures in "Values", or put a single measure/column in Values and put another single column/measure in as "Legend".  In the former, the different columns/measures will manifest as different lines; in the latter case, the different values within the column/measure will show the different lines.  Because of this, the multi-variate type of analysis you are looking to do (by time before/after event, per date and per measurement type) is going to be highly difficult in PowerBI. Data science languages like R or Python are more equipped for that (and still require a lot of data prep).

As far as my initial suggestion:

- Convert the time of day of the measurement (and event) into minutes/hour before/after the event (with the event itself being 0)

- Isolate the date part of the data (strip off the time)

- Create a line chart with the minutes before/after as "Axis", Temperature as "Value" and Date as "Legend".  Repeat this for Humidity, Wind Speed, etc.

This should at least allow you to see patterns in a single measurement before and after an event.  To go further you would probably need a data science type package.

If this still doesn't make sense, please share some sample data and I may be able to put together some examples for you.

Hope this helps

David

[ericOnline]

Thank you @dedelman_clng, its good for me to understand the capabilities of Power BI vs. other platforms. For now, I can live without the leading-up-to and post-event analysis. I feel like I'm very close to the during-event comparison I need to move forward.

With WeatherDate as Axis and Temp/Humidity/DewPoint/etc as Values, I able to get this chart which shows all events and their values. Is there not a way using Power BI that I can simply overlay each of these? I mean, they are right there on the graph, there's got to be a way to move them on top of eachother without going full data science mode.

[dedelman_clng]

Hi @ericOnline - Unfortunately I can't think of any way to do specifically what you're asking using PowerBI.