Slope Chart by SmartVisuals

Before and after, done right. Compare two periods as a slope or a dumbbell chart, straight from your model: one measure per period, or one measure plus a Year, Quarter, Month or Scenario column. No DAX tricks, no helper measures for labels or colours. With premium, the same chart becomes a business review pack: who made the total move, actual vs plan, every period up to the latest 36, the Top N movers and one panel per region.

Labels that never overlap. End labels spread apart with leader lines; on a small canvas the least important ones give way first. Change annotations sit next to every line: %, absolute, both, percentage points (automatic for percent measures) or rank move. A period that starts at or below zero shows the absolute change, never a misleading %.

Free features (no license needed, no time limit):

• Slope and dumbbell views for two periods, from two measures or a Period column; with three or more periods choose first and last or the last two (year over year)
• Rising / falling / flat colouring with a dead band (e.g. +-2%), and a Higher is better switch for costs, defects or scrap
• Conditional formatting: category colours accept Power BI fx rules, one rule colours every line; dynamic format strings
• Data labels, change annotations, data point markers, line width, straight or smooth lines, period headers as axis titles, value gridlines, a fixed value range (e.g. from zero)
• A reference line for a target or threshold
• Focus on named categories, rising only or falling only - the rest fades to grey
• 4 themes with distinct personalities (SmartVisuals, Dark, Clean, Slate), report theme colours, on-object formatting
• Legend with title, position and counts; click Rising, Falling or Flat to filter the whole report to that group
• Tooltips with change and rank, report page tooltips, modern tooltips with drill actions
• Cross-filtering, highlighting, multi-visual selection, drilldown, bookmarks, right-click context menu
• Accessibility: one tab stop with arrow keys, Enter, Esc and Shift+F10; visible focus outline; screen-reader labels and a hidden data table; direction shown by glyphs, not colour alone; high contrast; minimum text size and Reduce motion
• Localized in 20 languages: English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified, Traditional)

Premium - the business review pack (per-user license via Microsoft Marketplace):

• Change drivers: each item's share of the total change, ranked as bars beside the chart ("2 product lines explain 80% of the growth")
• Plan as a third point: add a Plan measure and every line shows its plan marker and the gap to plan
• All periods: the path through every month, quarter or year, up to the latest 36
• Top / Bottom N focus by % change, absolute change, rank move or last value
• Small multiples: one slope per region or plant, with shared scales; click a panel title to filter the report
• Story headline written from your data
• Bump view (ranks computed for you), indexed (first period = 100) and share-of-period scales
• Average benchmark line with above / below colouring, and reference lines 2 and 3

Every premium feature is fully unlocked while editing, so you can build and test everything before buying. Viewers without a license always see a working two-period chart - never a broken, blocked or watermarked visual. No data leaves Power BI: no external calls, no privileges requested.

Built for finance (plan vs actual, year over year, what drove the change), operations (plant KPIs where lower is better), sales (mix and rank shifts) and survey owners (wave over wave).

New in 1.1.0.0: change drivers, plan as a third point, the Periods switch, reference lines, click-to-filter legend and panels, on-object formatting, dynamic format strings and modern tooltips. Reports built with an earlier version keep their look.

Documentation: https://smartvisuals.io/visuals/slope-chart - Support: https://smartvisuals.io/support#slope-chart - Release notes: https://smartvisuals.io/changelog#slope-chart - hello@smartvisuals.io