Forecasting in Power View for Office 365

Q: What's forecasting in Power View for Office 365, and how do I get started using the capability?

A: Forecasting is a new feature in Power View for Office 365 that presents you with forecasting results from a series of data. Note that you'll get the most out of this feature if you use time series data or uniformly increasing whole numbers.

Related: New Forecasting Capabilities in Power View for Office 365

Forecasting Requirements

There's several different things to keep in mind when using this feature. First, forecasting is only available for line charts, as multiple-line charts are incompatible even if all but one line is filtered out. Furthermore, the line chart must have fewer than 1,000 values, and the four most recent values in the time series must increase uniformly.

Additionally, the x-axis value absolutely needs to have a date/time format or be a uniformly increasing whole number. The x-axis value can't contain text or decimal numbers, and be careful about dates that appears as formatted text—this also won't work for forecasting. Last but not least, the interval between values has to be set to at least one day, in order for forecasting to function correctly.

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Give Forecasting a Try

Now that you're ready to dive into the new forecasting functionality, make sure to upload a workbook that contains a Power View time series line chart to Power BI for Office 365.

Next, you'll need to open the file in Power BI and switch to "Power View in HTML 5." From there, click the forecast arrow or drag the forecast dot in the line chart to see forecasting options in the Analysis pane to the right-side of the application. Figure 1 shows an example of using forecasting in Power BI for Office 365 (Image Credit: Microsoft):

Figure 1: Forecasting in Power View for Office 365

Have you tried the new forecasting feature in Power BI for Office 365? Let us know what you think in the article comments!