Mark Cunningham
- Jul 11, 2021
- 3 min read

Charticulator - Creating a Dynamic Slope Chart

You can accomplish a massive amount using the native Power BI charts however there are often times when they don't quite work the way you want them to.

I recently wrote a post about being Visually Articulate. In it I reference the use of some key techniques that will help

The Requirement:

I needed to create a visually articulate slope chart which complied with the follow the best practice principals so that the data story was more easily understood by the report consumer. In this case I wanted to leverage the following;

Pre-attentive Visual Properties of Color: Highlighting the best and worst performing categories based on their ranking.
Gestalt Principals of Proximity & Similarity: adding the data labels and values to the end of the line as well as coloring them dependent on their rank.

This chart needs to be dynamic so when the filters are applied the new max and min values are coloured correctly and the data labels and values are positioned appropriately.

The Solution:

A 'Slope Chart' was developed using Charticulator as per the following report

How it was done

I have created a simplified PBIX to show how the above was created and will reference that going forward. The link to the PBIX file can be found at the end of this post.

Setting it Up

Shaping the data in Power Query

This step will be completely dependent on how you receive that data. For this exercise the data was provided as per the following table.

Power Query was used to Pivot the Data so all the values where in the same column. This makes it much easier to bind the Value field when building the chart in Charticulator.

Enriching the Data

Some simple DAX explicit measures are used to derive additional data that will be used to drive the conditional coloring of the best and worst performing category, dynamically by using RANKX of Growth%.

Build Data Frame Table

It is recommended that prior to building in Charticulator that you create the a display table which includes all the values you intend to bind in your chart. This allows you to test your data to ensure that it is calculating what you expect before using it to build a new chart.

Building it in Charticulator

With the data prepped and ready it time to build the new visually articulate chart in Charticulator.

Install Charticulator from App Source - I wont go through the steps here as its assumed most have imported a custom visual from App Source before. If not then here is the Microsoft support document on it.

Getting the Data into Charticulator

With the table visual selected, click on the Charticulator icon in the visualizations pane. This converts the table to a Charticulator visual and has the benefit of moving the table values into the data well of Charticulator Note: You may need to make a few minor changes as I did here. No values are required in the 'Links' well as that is not needed for the type of visual we are creating.

With the values in the right wells, select more options>Edit to relaunch the Charticulator editor.

Creating the Chart

The following short video walks through how to create this simple slope chart in Charticulator.

Conclusion

This has been a simple example of what can be accomplished using Charticulator to create more Visually Articulate and dynamic chart. The slope chart now better utilises best practice design principals and makes it easier for your audience to understand the message that you are trying to convey.