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Bump Chart

The Bump Chart by ChartPad is a custom Power BI visual for reading position rather than magnitude. It ranks your series at every point in time and draws one line per series through those ranks, so the story you get is a race: who leads, who overtakes whom, who slides down the table, and when it happened.

It is built for report editors who want a league table that moves — product rankings by quarter, teams by round, regions by month, channels by week — without writing any code.

What it can do​

  • Ranks calculated for you — bind a measure and the visual ranks the series at every step; you never pre-compute a rank column.
  • Top N focus — keep only the series that reach the top N, so 60 products become the 10 that matter.
  • Reverse the scale — put rank 1 at the bottom when your audience reads a "climb to the top".
  • Smooth or straight lines — monotone curves for a flowing race, straight segments for a precise read.
  • Circle, square or hexagon markers — sized to taste, with the rank number printed inside them.
  • Series labels at both ends — names on the left, the right, or both, with automatic collision avoidance.
  • Per-series colours — a colour picker for every series, defaulting to your report theme palette.
  • Cross-filtering — click a line, a marker or a legend item to filter the rest of the report; ctrl+click to multi-select.
  • Rich tooltips — series, period, value and rank by default, plus up to five extra fields of your own, including report-page tooltips.
  • International — the interface is translated into 36 languages, and your values follow their model format strings.
  • Accessible — keyboard-reachable lines and markers, screen-reader labels, and full Power BI high-contrast support.
Microsoft-certified

The Bump Chart is a Microsoft-certified Power BI visual: its code has been reviewed and tested to confirm it doesn't access any external services, so your data never leaves Power BI. Certified visuals are safe for enterprise use and support export to PowerPoint/PDF and email subscriptions. See Certified by Microsoft.

Anatomy of the visual​

RegionWhat it shows
Plot areaOne line per series. Vertical position is rank, horizontal position is the period.
MarkersOne per series per period, carrying that period's rank number.
Series labelsThe series name, drawn beside its first and/or last marker.
X-axisOne label per period, in the order your data defines.
LegendThe series list, positionable on any side and clickable to filter.

How to read it​

  • The top line is rank 1 — the highest value in that period. (Turn on Reverse Rank to flip this.)
  • A line crossing another is an overtake: the two series swapped positions between those periods.
  • A steep line is a fast climb or fall; a flat line is a series holding its position.
  • The number inside a marker is that series' rank in that period.
  • A gap in a line means the series dropped out of the Top N for those periods — it still exists, it just isn't in the visible band.
Rank, not value

A bump chart deliberately throws away magnitude. Two series a hair apart and two series an order of magnitude apart look identical — one rank step. That is what makes overtakes readable, and it is also why you should keep the value in the tooltip. If the size of the gap is the story, use a line or bar chart instead.

Before you start​

The Bump Chart is free to try — every feature works during evaluation. To use it in a published report without an on-visual license notice, each editor and viewer needs a license (a 30-day free trial is available). See Licensing & support.

Next steps​

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