Back in April this year, we announced that a great new visualization was available for time series analyses that used the new “Categorical Date” variable type. Existing time plots that used the older Date/Time variable type were unaffected and continued to use the previous line graph component. Since then, we’ve worked to extend the new line graph functionality to those original Date/Time variables so that everyone can benefit from their better design and functionality, and we can now announce that all time plots will be using the new visualization. Below you will find a summary of what you can expect from your new time plots in Crunch.

Category selection

Line graphs become really hard to read when there are lots of lines shown simultaneously, so Crunch now defaults to showing just the top 5 for newly created analyses, but you can pick whichever combination of lines (including showing more or fewer than 5) from the new “Select categories” interface. This allows you to show just the lines that tell your chosen data story. And your selection is then reflected in PowerPoint exports and dashboards.

Existing line graphs, saved to decks or used in dashboards, will have their current set of lines preserved so you won’t see any changes to the lines shown.

Confidence bands

Crunch’s line graphs now support the display of confidence bands, calculated at 95% confidence, and you can turn these on or off with a click of the * asterisk button.

Draggable bar

As well as being able to hover over points to see their values, there’s a vertical bar that you can drag to any point in the time-series to see all the values and ranking at that point in time.

Note that there are two benefits not available for Date/Time analyses because they rely on the new Categorical Date variable type: Smoothing (a.k.a. “Rolling averages”) and editable time-axis labels. There is therefore still good motivation for using Categorical Date variables in your projects. You can read more about the smoothing feature here and about the editable labels here.

For full details of this new feature and where to find it, see the help center.

We’d love your feedback at support@crunch.io.