It looks like Power BI is doing some form of SQL Union logic when combining data from two or more tables on a table visual.
In the image above you can see there are only two rows displayed. Within the data however there are in fact 4 rows, and all are valid to me. When I add another column that is distinct per row, it shows the data I expect. See image below:
I have two questions, can I change this default behavior?
If not, can I hide a column within a table visual while still having its data affect the display? That OrderDetailKey has no value to my users, which is why I didn't display it in the first place.
Related
I am attempting to create a line chart with two separate lines, by applying separate filters. To do so I have used slicers to create two tables CF1 and CF2 which is the original data filtered for the respective filters on the LHS and RHS of the data below (using relationships).
However, when displaying the information on a chart the second set of data is showing as the sum of the values instead of values as CF1 is.
I have tried creating a line chart with only CF1 or CF2 as the values and that works without issue.
To make this happen you need a common X-axis column to establish the evaluation context.
Now you are using the date column from one of the tables, say Table 1 which causes the measure that scans your Table 2 to just sum all entries, since the evaluation context does not filter Table 2 at all.
Read up on calendar tables and implement that. There are plenty of resources on this on the Web. See this example from Radacad, for instance.
I am loading an Excel file, in which it has 43 rows, all the rows are identical. This is the only file I'm loading and there are no connections relationships in the model whatsoever.
When I plot my data into a table visual, and choose not to summarize any of my fields, Power BI still shows me one row. While if I change any of the field to do a count of it, it shows me correctly that I have 43 rows. I need to be able to see all the 43 rows in my table.
Why is Power BI summarizing my data even if I command it not to do so?
Am I missing something simple?
Input table as seen in Power BI data tab:
The visual I'm trying to create:
The table visual in Power BI behaves similar to a Pivot Table in Excel.
W/o an aggregation defined, the "Values" fields behave like "Rows" in a Pivot Table and you will only see distinct items or distinct item combinations. You have 43 identical records, hence it is represented as one row in the visual.
With an aggregation defined (Sum, Count, ...) the field behaves like "Values" in a Pivot Table, and you get the result of that aggregation, filtered by the distinct items/combinations to the left, which is again one row in your case.
If you just want to show all the records in a table visual, you'll have to make them unique. The easiest way to achieve that is by adding an index column in PowerQuery and then also showing that index in the table visual.
However, this is not exactly what Power BI is made for and you are probably better off by switching to something like PowerPoint instead.
And btw., newer show sceenshots in stackoverflow, always provide sample data instead.
I'm currently building a report in Power BI. I added a matrix table along with its data. The matrix table just consist of sums per column (shown below).
There are multiple of slicers I have for the report. The problem is when I start filtering, the data disappears from the matrix. Instead of disappearing, I want it those values to be zero.
I have already used the measure: IF(ISBLANK(SUM(COUNT)), 0, SUM(COUNT) And it still did not work (shown below). What should I do so that the zeroes would appear on the matrix table?
There are two things you need for this approach to work
You need your Categories in a separate table to the rest of your data (joined by category ID) - if you don't have an ID, you can get away with Category name). You can build this table in DAX with something like CategoryTable = DISTINCT(MyData[CategoryName]). This new table and your data table need to be linked with a relationship. On your visual, use the Category from the Categories table and the measure you have created.
Make sure "Show items with no data" is checked on the matrix's fields.
so, I got 3 xlsx full of data already treated, so I pretty much just got to display the data using the graphs. The problem seems to be, that Powerbi aggregates all numeric data (using: count, sum, etc.) In their community they suggest to create new measures, the thing is, in that case I HAVE TO CREATE A LOT OF MEASURES...Also, I tried to convert the data to text and even so, Powerbi counts it!!!
any help, pls?
There are several ways to tackle this:
When you pull a field into the field well for a visualisation, you can click the drop down in the field well and select "Don't summarize"
in the data model, select the column and on the ribbon select "don't summarize" as the summarization option in the Properties group.
The screenshot shows the field well option on the left and the data model options on the right, one for a numeric and one for a text field.
And, yes, you never want to use the implicit measures, i.e. the automatic calculations that Power BI creates. If you want to keep on top of what is being calculated, create your own measures, and yes, there will be many.
Edit: If by "aggregating" you are referring to the fact that text values will be grouped in a table (you don't see any duplicates), then you need to add a column with unique values to the table so all the duplicates of the text values show up. This can be done in the data source by adding an Index column, then using that Index column in the table and setting it to a very narrow with to make it invisible.
In Power BI, I've got some query tables generated from imported data. All the data comes in as type 'Any', and I'm trying to automatically detect the type of the data in each column.
Some of the queries generate tables with columns based on the in-coming data - I don't know what the columns are going to be until the query runs and sets up the table (data comes from an Azure blob). As I will have quite a few tables to maintain, which columns can change (possibly new columns being added) with any data refresh, it would be unmanageable to go through all of them each time and press 'Detect Data Type' on the columns.
So I'm trying to figure out how I can do a 'Detect Data Type' in the query formula language to attach to the end of the query that generates the table columns. I've tried grabbing the first entry in a column and do Value.Type(column{0}), however this seems to come out as 'Text' for a column which has integers in it. Pressing 'Detect Data Type' does however correctly identifies the type as 'Whole Number'.
Does anyone know how to detect a column's entry types?
P.S. I'm not too worried about a column possibly holding values of different data types
You seem to have multiple issues here. And your solution will be fragile, there's a better way. But let's first deal with column type detection. Power Query uses the 'any' data type as it's go to data type. You can write a function that samples the rows of a column in a table does a best match data type detection then explicitly sets the data type of the column. This is probably messy and tricky since you need to do it once per column. This might be workable for a fixed schema but for a dynamic schema you'll run into a couple of things very quickly. First you'll need to write some crazy PQ code to list all the columns and run you function on each. This will work the first time, but might break in subsequent refreshes because data model changes are not allowed during refresh. If you're using a tool like Power BI Desktop, you'll be able to fix things up. If you publish your report to the Power BI service, you'll just see refresh errors.
Dynamic Schemas will suffer the same data model change issue I mentioned above.
The alternate solution that you won't have problems with is using a Direct Query data source instead of using Power Query. If you load your data into Azure SQL or a Tabular Model, the reporting layer will get the updated fields automatically so you don't have to try to work around using PQ.