Pareto Chart

The threshold line defaults to 80 percent and can sit at any percentage. Every category to the left of the point where the cumulative line crosses it is a vital-few category and gets the vital-few colour; everything to the right is the trivial many. The visual writes the finding as a sentence, "7 of 212 categories drive 80 % of the total", so the reader does not have to count bars.

Because the split is computed, not eyeballed, it survives filters. Filter to one plant and the sentence updates to that plant's own vital few. That is the difference between a Pareto chart and a Pareto analysis: the chart shows the shape, the analysis names the categories that matter right now.

Inventory and quality teams rarely stop at one threshold. ABC classification splits the ranked categories into an A zone, a B zone and a C zone at cut-offs you choose, 80 / 95 / 100 by default, shades the zones, labels them and carries the class into every tooltip. It is the SQLBI and DAX Patterns ABC recipe, without the calculated columns.

QM mode adds the data table quality engineers expect beside the chart: rank, value, percentage and cumulative percentage per category, in the layout Minitab and Excel Pareto templates use, so a chart pasted into an audit report carries its own numbers.

Map a period field with two values to Compare and the visual draws the two Paretos side by side with rank-change markers, so the reader sees that the defect code that led before the corrective action has dropped to fourth. Map a plant, line or region instead and the same field turns into small multiples, one Pareto per group, each ranked and scaled on its own values.

Add a second measure to switch the ranking between count and cost from a dropdown, or draw a second cumulative line for the other metric, which answers the question that follows every defect Pareto: the most frequent defect is rarely the most expensive one.

Real SKU, customer and defect-code Paretos have hundreds or thousands of categories. The visual loads up to 30,000 of them, ranks them all, and shows the top N with the rest grouped into a single Others bar; clicking it cross-filters to every category it holds. The free tier renders up to 25 individual categories plus Others, which covers teaching examples and small defect lists; with the premium licence, Max bars goes up to 200 bars including Others. The vital few and the ABC classes are always computed on the full list.

Values honour the format strings of your measures, so a currency measure shows as currency and a percentage measure as a percentage, and drill hierarchies work the way they do in native visuals.