Choose between continuous and categorical axes
Tuesday, February 1st, 2022
The PL-300 exam skills guide has a topic, “choose between continuous and categorical axes,” but I couldn’t find any documentation the option to format an axis as categorical or continuous. I did see that when I created a line chart, the format pane has the option to se the x-axis as categorical or continuous.
Based on what I’ve seen by experimenting with the settings:
- formatting the x-axis as categorical will mean that the axes labels are correspond to the level of detail on the chart.
- formatting the x-axis as continuous will mean that the axis labels do not correspond to the level of detail in the chart.
This correspond to the definitions of categorical (also called discrete) and continuous. Categorical values are separate and distinct, while continuous values exist anywhere along a range.
I created two identical line graphs, but one with the continuous setting and the other with categorical:
These look pretty much identical, but then I clicked the “expand hierarchy” button on both:
Both line graphs now have more detail, but the x-axis that is set as continuous hasn’t changed, while the x-axis set as categorical has labels that correspond to the increased detail.
When I click expand again, the categorical x-axis gets a scroll bar in order to accommodate all the labels:
Download Power BI workbook for continuous-vs-discrete