The Power BI Pulse Chart is a visualization tool that can help you take your data storytelling to the next level. It lets you highlight critical events over time in an engaging way by animating them on a timeline. This can uncover hidden patterns and insights that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. Using time to tell in data storytelling story can be one of the most valuable tools in your visualization toolbox to tell your data story

Great Example of Using Time

This visualization from Climate Time Machine (nasa.gov) and Earth Matters – Visualizing the Warmest August in 136 Years (nasa.gov) are great examples of using Time Animation to tell a story. The animation, over time, shows precisely what the authors intended in a straightforward and visual way. The colors are not jarring and change with the intensity of the data. The most interesting takeaway was the building year by year, showing the average increase as we get to the highest values today.

Being able to tell a story with your data and get that point across effectively was well done here. I found this was a perfect visualization example for the trend over time of the temperature data. We can use the time to tell a story in Power BI with visualizations like the Pulse Chart.

What are Pulse Charts?

Power BI has a gallery of visuals in the Business Apps – Microsoft AppSource Market Place you can bring into Dashboards. However, the Pulse Chart is a custom visual and not an out-of-the-box visualization installed into Power BI natively.

The Pulse chart allows you to show key events on a timeline and then animate them with a playback of the events to reveal patterns and insights. There is no better way to learn about this chart than to see it in action, so let’s go through a quick tutorial to build the following visualization.

How to Tell a Story over Time

The data point was to show the increase in the rate of cases over the time of the outbreak. As you see from the above visualization, an event occurs as a multiple of 500 case thresholds is broken. As time moves on, the numbers get larger, but what can be missed is the rate of increase in the daily case count.

By having an event occur each time a barrier is broken, the points are close together as the cases arise. As time passes, the rate at which the case multiple of 500 is broken speeds up. It tells more of the story than just having the line chart.

Power BI Pulse Chart – Tutorial

Step 1 – Find the Pulse Chart and add it to Power BI

Once you have opened a new Power BI Book in Power BI Desktop, you will see three dots (1) at the end of the visualization panel. When you select, this will bring up a search dialogue. Type in Pulse (2), which will filter the list to the Pulse Chart, and select Add (3). to add the chart to the selection.

Step 2 – Create the Data Source

I created an Excel file from a CSV, pictured below. You need to have a Date to use as the Timestamp, a value, and Events if you want to show events.

Once you have imported the data, the Pulse Chart takes the following elements shown in the below capture.

Step 3 – Populate the Fields

Populating the data fields is pretty straightforward. You will find that there are many options that you can have, making this a very flexible visualization.

Step 4 – Settings and Formatting

Okay, so in the previous step, I mentioned that there were many display options; the amount of visual formatting and customization seems endless. Below I have put in the full set of formatting options on the right and have called out the Playback settings on the right. I found those changes quite a bit depending on the data.

Wrapping UP

I can often get lost in the number of visualizations and even fail to see new ones that come out. Go through the gallery of visuals and see what is new and what you might find interesting. Just throw data into Excel, do a quick Power Bi visualization, and see what you can add to your toolbox.  Note that picking color combinations is also important..