Power BI Blog: Unshared and Unsynchronised Axes for Small Multiples Charts

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series.  This week, we look at unshared and unsynchronised axes for Small Multiples charts.

Sometimes, when reading a Small Multiples visual, a user might not be too concerned in comparing the absolute values of the numbers displayed against each other, instead only interested in comparing the trends of each category across time.  However, when the ranges of the data for each Small Multiples category vary wildly, the charts with low maxima get pushed down compared to charts with high maxima.  It becomes difficult to evaluate the sales trend for lower charts because it looks close to a horizontal line.

There are now a couple of new options to help you accommodate for those cases, allowing you to plot each Small Multiples chart against separate y-axes and then change the automatic scaling of each axis.  You’ll find the new options, ‘Shared y-axis’ and ‘Scale to fit’, in the Y-axis card of the Formatting pane.

Turning off the ‘shared y-axis’ option will give each of your Small Multiples charts their own y-axis:

Turning on the ‘scale to fit’ option will change their automatic scaling:

This new functionality will affect the auto minimum and maximum values.  If the user has defined a minimum or maximum for the Small Multiples, the toggle won’t override that boundary.  Any secondary y-axes will follow the settings from the main y-axis.

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here.  If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.