Measure sections
Each measure drawn on the chart gets its own section. A single measure’s section is titled Measure; from two on they are numbered Measure 1, Measure 2, and so on, and each row gains a grip you can drag to reorder the measures. List order decides drawing order, so the first measure is drawn first. The row holds three controls plus the axis-side toggle:
Use the section’s Measure actions menu (⋮) to Add a measure, or to Remove measure once
there are two. There is no limit on the number of measures.
Axis sides
With two or more measures, each one is assigned to Left axis or Right axis — Bottom axis and Top axis when the bars are horizontal. Any number of measures can sit on one side. Measures sharing a side share its scale, and the axis title lists them in list order. A side is drawn only while a measure uses it, so putting every measure on the right gives you a right axis and no left one. This is how you combine measures whose units or magnitudes differ — order count as bars on the left, revenue per order as a line on the right. Bar measures on one side are drawn side by side inside each category band, in list order. Lines and points are drawn over them against the same scale.Break down by
Each measure has its own Break down by row: pick a dimension to split that measure into one series per dimension value. Measures are broken down independently, and two measures can be broken down by different dimensions. Next to the dimension slot, the placement control decides how the resulting series sit relative to each other. It is disabled until a dimension is picked, and its options depend on the mark:
Side by side is unavailable when two bar measures already share the axis, since each measure already
occupies its own bar in the band.
A break-down decides what a color stands for, so it also decides how the measure is colored — see
color scales.
Dimension
The Dimension section holds the shared category or time axis — the one every measure is drawn against. Its header carries the Chart orientation switch: Vertical bars, the dimension on the X axis or Horizontal bars, the dimension on the Y axis. Rotating the chart rotates every measure, including lines and areas, and the panel keeps its shape. Horizontal bars suit long category labels and long category lists. The switch is offered on every cartesian chart except scatter, and is disabled with a reason while the chart is incomplete — Add a measure to rotate the bars or Add a dimension to rotate the bars. A Sort row appears where sorting applies, on an ordinal dimension with no time granularity. The scale type is derived rather than asked for: a time dimension is temporal on a line, area, or scatter chart and ordinal on a bar chart; any other dimension is ordinal.Small multiples
Small multiples splits the chart into a grid of panels, one per value of a dimension — see small multiples for the grid, scale, and sorting options. The control appears once per chart, and is disabled with a reason while two axis sides are in use.Tooltips
The Tooltips row summarizes what is shown on hover — All fields, N fields, or None. Open it to check or uncheck the query’s columns, dimensions first. Unchecking all turns tooltips off. The setting applies to the whole chart, not to one measure. See tooltips for hover behavior.Scatter charts
A scatter chart plots measures against each other, so it takes a different set of slots: X-Axis and Y-Axis (both measures), Series to color the points by a dimension, and Size to scale each point’s radius by a measure. There is no orientation switch and no break-down row. A Scatter mark and the scatter chart type are separate things. Any measure can take the scatter mark to draw its values as points against the shared dimension, alongside a bar or a line. The scatter chart type is the one that replaces the measure sections with the slots above.The chart type follows the fields
The chart type shown on the chart-type button is derived from what you build rather than set separately:
Picking a tile in the chart-type picker is an edit, not a reset: it sets every measure’s mark, and a
bar tile also sets the first measure’s placement. Break-downs, axis sides, tooltips, and small
multiples survive. Scatter is the exception — it rebuilds the chart around its own slots.
Composite has no tile of its own; it appears once your measures’ marks differ.
When a measure can’t be summed
Cube folds the result rows down to what the chart draws. Which operation it folds with comes from the measure’s own aggregation type in the data model, so a count or a sum is summed, and a min or a max folds with its own operation. Some measures cannot be folded correctly at all — an average, a ratio, a distinct count, a running total, or a custom expression. When the query groups by a dimension the chart does not draw, or the time granularity is coarser than the query’s, such a measure would produce a wrong number. Rather than draw it, Cube refuses the chart with a notice naming what to fix:Completed percentage can’t be summed across Status. Remove Status from the query, or add it to the chart.Either fix works: drop the dimension from the query, or bring it onto the chart — as the Dimension, or in Break down by — so nothing has to be folded. Measures that fold safely are unaffected, and when nothing needs folding every measure is drawn.