Violin Plot by SmartVisuals

See the shape a box plot hides. Violin, half violin, split violin, raincloud and ridgeline plots for Power BI, with density estimates you can state and defend.

Free, and never blocked

• Five shapes: violin, half violin, split violin (two Split By levels share one violin), raincloud (density, box and every observation) and ridgeline.
• Density done properly: Scott, Silverman or R's default bandwidth, a smoothness control, trim to the data range, equal-area, equal-width or n-scaled violins.
• Inside the violin: a box, quartile lines, the points or nothing; whisker rules and quartiles by Excel / DAX INC or EXC or Tukey's hinges.
• Reference lines: mean, median and up to four percentiles, for all data or per group.
• Split By (two levels), sorting by name, minimum group size, horizontal or vertical layout, large-data input (Value as column + Count), a smart caption and a methods footnote.

Readers without a licence always see the free chart: no watermark, no broken report.

Power BI features (free)

• Tooltips: n, median, quartiles, mean, IQR and whiskers on every violin and ridge; ID, value and your extra Tooltips fields on every point; report page tooltips supported.
• Highlight and cross-filter: click a violin or point to filter the report, Ctrl adds to the selection, cross-highlighting from other visuals keeps the whole as a ghost, bookmarks keep the selection, right-click context menu.
• Drilldown on a Group hierarchy (Plant > Line), drill up or expand all; conditional formatting (fx) of the group colour from a rule on the Value.
• Data labels for median, quartiles and mean; a legend for Split By (show, top or bottom position, font size, colour).
• Axes: axis titles, fixed minimum and maximum, log scale, decimals, font size and colour, grid lines, n per group.
• Data point markers with size, opacity and colour, jittering (beeswarm, random jitter or strip), fill opacity, four mean marker shapes, a colour per group.
• Responsive: on small tiles the caption, footnote and legend step aside so the violins keep their room.
• Format on the canvas (on-object formatting).
• Four themes, four fonts, transparent background; localized in 20 languages (format pane, captions, tooltips, announcements).

Accessibility: one keyboard tab stop. Arrow keys, Home / End and Page Up / Down move between violins or ridges with a visible focus outline; Enter or Space filters the report to the focused group, Ctrl adds, Escape clears. A screen-reader live region announces each group's median, quartiles and n, and the chart is labelled with its smart caption. The Accessibility card sets the focus outline colour and width and a minimum text size. Statistic lines differ by dash pattern, never by colour alone; high-contrast mode draws the violins as outlines in the system colours. Nothing animates.

Premium: compare and prove (per-user licence)

• Significance between groups or split halves: Welch t or Mann-Whitney U, Holm or Bonferroni, ANOVA or Kruskal-Wallis, brackets or letters.
• Advanced density: six kernels, a fixed bandwidth, bounded support by reflection.
• Confidence intervals, weights, spec limits (typed or from measures) with Cp to Cpm, small multiples.
• Sort by median, mean, IQR or n, seven more quartile types, Split By with 3+ levels, a second reference line.

Premium previews free in Desktop and edit mode. Statistics run offline, golden-tested against scipy and statsmodels; no external calls.

Single view or the multi-view?

This is the single-view edition ($1.99 per user per month). SmartVisuals Distribution ($4.49) adds box plot, beeswarm and histogram views over the same fields, with the same premium layer. Licences do not carry across offers. For density charts alone this one is cheaper; with three or more chart types the multi-view is.

New in 1.1.0.0: drilldown on Group, conditional formatting (fx) of the group colour; premium second reference line; defaults draw exactly what 1.0.1.0 drew. Sorting by a statistic, extra quartile types and 3+ Split By levels are now premium; reports created before 1.1.0.0 keep these features.

Documentation: https://smartvisuals.io/visuals/violin | Support: https://smartvisuals.io/support#violin | Release notes: https://smartvisuals.io/changelog#violin