Animated Storytelling in Power BI with Play Axis

What if your Power BI dashboards could do more than just display static data? Imagine watching your metrics dynamically progress through Months, Regions, or Product Categories automatically and seamlessly, offering a story-like experience. This is the promise of Play Axis: a way to animate your data, revealing evolving trends and patterns that are often missed in static views.

Super Filter’s Play Axis stands apart, with powerful features that enable:

• Support for multi-level hierarchies that lets you seamlessly animate through the combinations of values in a hierarchy like Year → Month.
• Cumulative filtering to show running totals or build-on effects across time.
• Enhanced customization options for fine-tuning the playback experience to fit your reporting needs.

Key Features of Inforiver’s Play Axis

Multi-Level Selection

Go beyond single-dimension animations! Inforiver Super Filter's Play Axis supports multi-level hierarchies in Power BI, allowing you to seamlessly animate through complex combinations like 'Year → Month' or 'Region → Country → City. This intelligent feature cycles through all unique hierarchy combinations, revealing evolving patterns and trends that a standard Power BI animation might miss. For more information on Multi level selection, refer to the official documentation here .

Practical Use Cases

• Helps analyze performance by combining geography and customer segments like State > Segment. This enables granular insights into how different segments contribute within each region.
• As the Play Axis plays, it cycles through each state and its segments, providing a detailed view of regional dynamics.
• Refer to the example below to understand how Play Axis processes unique combinations across multiple levels such as State and Segment sequentially animating through each pair.

Figure 1: Multi-level selection example using State and Segment.

2. Layered Time Analysis Using Multi level selection

• Useful for analysing performance over time by animating through Year > Month hierarchies. This supports layered evaluation of trends within each year.
• Play Axis progresses through each month within its respective year, offering clear visibility into seasonality and year-over-year changes.
• Refer to the example below to understand how Play Axis processes unique combinations across multiple levels Year and Month by sequentially animating through each pair.

Figure 2: Multi level selection example using Year and Month.

Without Multi-Level Selection, you can only filter one category at a time—like viewing all data by Year first, then separately by Month—making it harder to understand how months relate to their corresponding years. For example, you’d see 2024 and 2025 first, and then January, February, etc., without knowing which month belongs to which year.

GIF 1: In the Retail Supply Chain and Sales Analysis dashboard, both State and Segment dimensions are used in the Play Axis for filtering, allowing multiple categories to be added and played through sequentially.

Cumulative Selection

Want to see how your sales build up month-over-month, or how customer segments accumulate over time? Inforiver Super Filter's Play Axis offers cumulative filtering, building on previous selections instead of replacing them. This feature is perfect for visualizing progressive growth, momentum, and Power BI trends across time or categories, creating a compelling data story. For more information on cumulative selection, refer to the official documentation here.

Practical Use Cases

1. Revealing Sales Trends with Time-Based Animation (Multi-Level)

• Useful for visualizing sales performance over time using a time-based hierarchy like Year > Month. This approach reveals seasonality, momentum, and cumulative growth trends.
• As the Play Axis animates, it progressively adds each month to the previous selection as shown below in the image.

Figure 3: Cumulative selection in Multi-level using example Year, Quarter and Month.

2. Cumulative Growth by Region and Customer Segment (Multi-Level)

• Helps analyse how states and their associated segments such as Consumer, Corporate, and Home Office contribute to overall business performance. This is useful for assessing customer mix and evaluating the impact of expansion strategies.
• As the Play Axis progresses, each segment is cumulatively added within each state, creating a layered view of performance, as illustrated in the example below.

Figure 4: Cumulative selection in Multi-level using example State and Segment.

3. Stacking Performance by Category (Single Level)

Applies to single-level categories like Product Category, where new values stack on top of previous ones to show cumulative totals.

Useful for showcasing how different product groups contribute to overall performance.

Refer to the example below to see how Play Axis cumulatively displays a single-level category. As the animation progresses, each new category like Office Supplies and Technology is added to the previous selection, creating a layered view of the data.

Figure 5: Cumulative selection for single level using Category.

Without this feature, each new selection would overwrite the previous one, making it hard to see the cumulative effect or track progress over time. Cumulative Selection creates a more compelling narrative by preserving previous filters during the animation, offering clarity and context.

GIF 2: In the Retail Supply Chain and Sales Analysis dashboard, the Play Axis uses both year and month to display data cumulatively starting from January 2015, then progressing through each subsequent month.

Customisation Options:

Beyond powerful filtering, Inforiver Super Filter provides extensive customization options for your Power BI Play Axis. Gain complete control over the animation experience with features like:

• Loop: Continuous playback, ideal for auto-displaying dashboards
• Auto Start: Automatically begins animation when the report loads perfect for presentations.
• Time Delay: Adjust the speed of transitions to make data changes easier to follow.
• Display Label: Keep users informed about the current selection during playback.
• Display Stop Button: Let users pause the loop for more control and interactivity.

Figure 6: Customisable play axis options in the format pane

These subtle yet powerful customizations elevate your Power BI data storytelling, enhance user experience, and make your dashboards truly dynamic Power BI visuals. To learn more about these options, please refer to the official documentation here.

For a detailed walkthrough on setting up Play Axis and using the features mentioned above, click here to watch the video.

Conclusion

Inforiver Super Filter’s Play Axis transforms how you interact with animated visuals in Power BI. By supporting multi-level hierarchies, enabling cumulative selections, and offering enhanced customization options, it offers a much richer and more engaging way to explore data over time or across categories.

Whether you are presenting regional growth trends, Sales rollouts, or Campaign performance, these features bring continuity, clarity, and context to your reports, turning simple animations into powerful data stories. Ready to take your Power BI dashboards to the next level? Try Inforiver Super Filter (Microsoft Certified and Free Forever) today and start creating interactive, insight-rich reports that bring your data to life.