Power BI: How to create a scatter plot with X-axis dates?

Question

I'm trying to create a simple scatter plot, with dates on the X axis and a count of events on the Y axis. In Excel it's easy: Excel recognizes the dates as legitimate axis material and automatically figures out logical increments.

But Power BI can't seem to manage that. When I assign the same two columns as I did in Excel, I get a nastygram:

My date table has a numeric "DayCounter" field, which is a numeric count of days since 1900 or thereabouts. Power BI likes that as an axis, but the increments will mean nothing to a human.

How do I get the BI axis to show dates?

Answer 1

Step_1: For [DateCounter] numeric column field, go to the query editor as you can see in the picture below:

Step_2: Click the top left corner, and change the data type from whole number to Date.

Step_3: You can see the converted data to date.

Step_4: Then exit the query editor, and go on to create the scatter chart. Put the [DateCounter] in the X_axis, and count on the y axis. Done! I tested a similar scenario with a fake data using scatter chart and a slicer to constrain the date column.

Answer 2

It's a bit insane, but this seems to be the way to do what you want: use a line chart to create a scatter plot. By default it looks like this:

Unlike the scatter plot, this chart has a notion of continuous vs. categorical values:

The scatter plot would show your data as evenly-spaced data points, sorted by date but with none of the information about the distance between dates. The line chart knows that dates mean something.

Now all that's left is to make it look the way you want. To do this, set the stroke width to 0 px and turn markers on:

Et voila: