How to Use Play Axis in Power BI

A static dashboard can show you a snapshot of your data, but revealing how that data changes over time requires something more dynamic. The Power BI Play Axis visual is a simple but powerful tool that turns your static reports into animated data stories, allowing you and your audience to watch trends unfold. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to add, configure, and use the Play Axis to bring your visuals to life.

What is the Power BI Play Axis?

The Play Axis is a custom visual in Power BI that acts like a dynamic slicer. Instead of manually clicking through different months, years, or categories to see how your data changes, the Play Axis adds a play button to your report. When you press it, the visual cycles through the values in a chosen data field (like a date or product category), automatically filtering the other visuals on your report page for each value.

The result is a simple animation. You can watch sales grow on a map, see how different product categories contribute to revenue each quarter, or track marketing campaign performance week-by-week. It's a fantastic way to tell a story and make trends immediately obvious without overwhelming your audience with complex filters.

When Should You Use a Play Axis?

While you could animate any report, the Play Axis shines brightest in specific scenarios where showing change is the whole point. Think of it as a tool for chronological or sequential storytelling.

Common Use Cases:

• Visualizing Time-Series Data: This is the most popular use. Animate charts to show monthly sales growth, quarterly profit changes, or annual website traffic trends.
• Tracking Geographic Changes: Use it with a bubble map to show how sales, customers, or incidents spread across different regions over time. For example, you could watch your customer base expand from state to state over several years.
• Comparing Performance Across Categories: While often used for time, the Play Axis can also cycle through non-chronological categories. You could animate a chart to show performance metrics for each sales representative, one after the other, or to highlight sales figures for different product lines.
• Analyzing Stages in a Funnel: Animate charts to follow a customer's journey through a marketing or sales funnel, showing how many prospects are at the 'Awareness', 'Consideration', and 'Decision' stages.

Getting Started: Importing the Play Axis Visual

The Play Axis is not one of the default visuals that comes with Power BI Desktop. It’s part of a library of community- and Microsoft-created visuals available on AppSource. Adding it to your report is simple.

Step-by-step guide to add the Play Axis visual:

1. Navigate to the Visualizations pane in Power BI Desktop.
2. Click the three dots (…) at the bottom of the set of visual icons, and select Get more visuals.
3. This opens the Power BI Visuals (AppSource) marketplace. In the search bar at the top, type "Play Axis".
4. Find the official "Play Axis (Dynamic Slicer)" visual and click on it.
5. Click the blue Add button to import it directly into your current Power BI file. You’ll now see its icon (a play button) appear in your Visualizations pane, ready to use.

How to Configure and Use the Play Axis

Now that you have the visual imported, let's put it to work. The key to making it function is connecting it to the right data field and having another visual on the page for it to animate.

Let's walk through an example of animating monthly sales data on a map.

Step 1: Create a Visual to Animate

First, build the core visual you want to see change. For our example, we'll create a simple map showing sales by state.

• Select the Map visual and add it to your report canvas.
• From your data fields, drag your location data (e.g., State) into the Location field well.
• Drag your measure (e.g., Sales Amount) into the Bubble size field well.

You should now see a map with bubbles over each state, sized according to total sales. Right now, this shows the lifetime sales for all months combined.

Step 2: Add the Play Axis to Your Report

Click the Play Axis icon in your Visualizations pane. This will add the slicer to your report canvas. It will look like a simple play button with "Drag fields here" text.

Step 3: Connect Your Time-Based Data

This is the most important step. The Play Axis needs to know which field it should cycle through. For our scenario, we want to see the data update for each month.

• Select the Play Axis visual on your canvas.
• From your data fields, find your date column (e.g., Month or Order Date) and drag it into the Field well in the Visualizations pane for the Play Axis.

The Play Axis will now display the first value from that field (e.g., "January"). Your map will automatically filter to show sales for just that first month.

Step 4: Press Play!

That's it for the basic setup. Click the triangle play button on the Play Axis slicer. Watch as the slicer cycles through each month — February, March, April, and so on. As it does, the bubbles on your map will update in real-time, growing or shrinking to reflect the sales performance for that specific month.

Customizing the Play Axis for Better Storytelling

Getting the animation to work is the first step. The next is to customize its settings to match your report's style and improve the user experience. Select the Play Axis visual and go to the Format visual tab (the paintbrush icon) in the Visualizations pane.

Under 'Animation Settings'

• Auto Start: If you toggle this on, the animation will begin playing automatically as soon as a user opens the report page. This is great for grabbing immediate attention in a presentation.
• Loop: A very useful feature. This will make the animation start over from the beginning once it reaches the last value. It's perfect for dashboards displayed on an office TV screen where you want a continuous, hands-off display.
• Resolution (milliseconds): This controls the speed of the animation — specifically, how long each frame is displayed. A lower number (e.g., 500ms) means a faster animation, while a higher number (e.g., 2000ms) will create a slower, more deliberate pace.

Under 'Colors'

Here you can control the look and feel of the control. You can change the color of the buttons (play, pause, next) to align with your company's brand colors or the design theme of your report. This helps the visual feel integrated and professional, not just tacked on.

Under 'Controls'

This section allows you to show or hide the different control buttons. For instance, you could remove the "Next" and "Previous" step icons to simplify the interface, leaving only the Play/Pause button for a cleaner look. You can also enable On-hover controls, which makes the buttons only appear when a user moves their mouse over the visual.

Tips and Best Practices

To use the Play Axis effectively, keep these points in mind:

• Keep Your Animation Focused: Don't try to animate an entire page full of complex visuals. It can become chaotic and distract from the main story. A Play Axis works best when it controls one or two key visuals that clearly show change, like a map and a corresponding bar chart.
• Use the Right Field Type: The Play Axis is most intuitive with ordered data, like dates (Year, Month, Day) or defined stages (Stage 1, Stage 2). Using it with unordered categories might work, but the "story" might not flow as logically.
• Tell Your Viewers What They're Watching: Add a descriptive title to the animated chart. Instead of just "Sales by State," use a dynamic title that explains what is happening. For instance, you can use a Card visual that displays the month being shown by the Play Axis slicer.
• Think About Speed: The default animation speed might be too fast for your audience to process the changes. Adjust the milliseconds in the Animation Settings to a pace that allows people to actually see the trends and outliers as they emerge.
• It Works When Published: Remember that once you publish your report to the Power BI Service, your end-users will be able to interact with the Play Axis themselves, playing, pausing, and stepping through the animation on their own.

Final Thoughts

In short, the Power BI Play Axis is an easy-to-use custom visual that adds an impressive layer of dynamic storytelling to your reports. By animating your data over time or across categories, you can transform a static dashboard into a clear and engaging narrative that makes trends impossible to ignore.

Creating these kinds of compelling, interactive views is all about making your data easier to understand. Here at Graphed, we believe getting insights shouldn't require clicking through formatting panes or hunting down custom visuals. For instance, instead of manually setting up a series of slicers and visuals, you can use Graphed to simply ask, "create a dashboard showing my Shopify sales growth by state each month" — and the animated, interactive report is generated for you instantly. We built it to automate the manual data wrangling so you can spend less time building reports and more time acting on the stories your data tells.