Standard Date Hierarchy

Configuring ZoomCharts Timeline visual can be intimidating, but getting it going with Power BI’s standard date hierarchy only requires 3 simple steps:

1. Drag your full date field (the one that has the date hierarchy attached to it) into the ‘Date Hierarchy’ field
   
   
   
   Power BI should populate it as a hierarchy in the field configuration:
   
   
   
   
2. Drag the same date field that you used in step (1) into the 'Date Value (X-Axis)' field, and Power BI should convert it to 'Earliest Date':
   
   
   Quick note: individual date hierarchy components are simple numbers and have no date meaning. The full date column is what allows Power BI to associate those simple numbers with date and/or time in your data model.
3. Finally, drag a numeric field into any of the Series fields (measure or column).

The resulting configuration should look something like this, which should be enough for Timeline visual to display your data:

Non-Standart Date Hierarchy

If you require a non-standard date hierarchy (for example, if you would like to combine years into decades or visualize hours, minutes or even miliseconds), you are free to create a custom date/date-time hierarchy or even use multiple individual fields. Only the 1^st step:

1. You can extract any (or all) individual date components from your date column with DAX and add them seperately to create your date/time hierarchy. Or you can combine the standard hierarchy with additional fields added at the top or bottom. The resulting setup with years, months, days and hours added seperately would look like this:
   
   
   
   

Important note: There are some restrictions, though. Because the individual date components you might have used are simple numbers and have no date meaning, for Timeline visual to interpret them as the correct date/time units, the columns must be named according to a convention. For example: '5 s' (for 5 seconds) or '15 minutes' (you guessed it - for 15 minutes). The full list of supported units and numbers can be found here.

Important note: the above units are only accepted exactly as written - in English. Translations of those units will not be interpreted by the visual, and warning message will be displayed: