Timeline slicer - ISO week

Hi guys,

We are fixing the issue.

ETA is early February.

Kind Regards,

Evgenii Elkin,
Software Engineer
Microsoft Power BI Custom Visuals
[email protected]

We need this fixed urgently. The slicer now fools the users that depend on week selection. We use the Timeline Slicer since it is far superior in user-friendliness to other slicing alternatives (especially so when you want to alternate between year/month/week and sometimes day selections).

I wrote this up like an email:

Hi,

We are unfortunately experiencing a bug with the Timeline Slicer developed by Microsoft. Ref. https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/power-bi-visuals/WA104380786?tab=DetailsAndSupport 

We have the slicer in its latest version (2.1.1). The slicer is not selecting the correct weeks for us. It seems to have a built in function to give week numbers based on the US ordering of weeks, and not the standard ISO weeks which is used in Europe.

Take the year 2017 as an example. The slicer shows 53 weeks there (since in the US, when 2017 starts its week 1 with the Sunday, 2017 ends up with 53 weeks), while the ISO week calendar only has 52 weeks in 2017. We had previously assumed it to support ISO-weeks when it let us select start of the week = “Monday”, but have now discovered there is no ISO-week logic in this slicer.

Will this slicer offer support for ISO weeks in the future?

We need it urgently fixed if possible, since we do not really have a good date slicing alternative in Power BI. Please let us know if it is possible to get faster resolution if we participate in some fashion. Could you suggest alternatives if it is not possible to get a quick fix? This slicer is a core component of our reports, and the default slicer cannot be compared in terms of user-friendliness.

Please see the image below that illustrates this. To recreate this, simply use a date dimension built with iso week numbers, and let date fill the timeline slicer. In this example, I expected the same days selected when I click “W1” in the slicer, and not “W2”. This is why I also show the weeks below.

("Mandag" = Monday, "Første dag i uken" = first day of week)

My interpretation is that this issue occurs for all years where january 1st is a friday, saturday or sunday, since the week numbering rules are then different. I.e. 3/7 (43%) of all years are displayed incorrectly for us in this slicer.

v-viig could you please give us an update?

Hi,

I think it's because the American method of week numbering differs from the ISO / European week numbering method. We over here in Europe, usually use Monday as the start of the week and in case January 1 is on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, that week is the 1st week of the next year. In case January 1 falls on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, the weeknumber is increased +1 with the previous weeknumber of last year. This is different from the "USA"-method, where the first week of the year depends on what day January 1 falls: in case it's a Sunday, PowerBI calculates week 1, otherwise it calculates a next weeknumber of the previous year for that week.

Outlook uses two settings to solve this:

- First day of week (in USA: Sunday, but in Europe, according to ISO weeknumbers: Monday)

- First week of year (in USA: Starts on January 1, but in Europe, according to ISO weeknumbers: First 4-day week).

In my opinion, the Timline slicer should be extended with the First Week Of Year setting to solve this issue of incorrect week numbers

Great to see that there is a larger base that has this issue so maybe it gets pushed forward faster.

As ora mentioned I logged an issue on the git repository for the visual: Support for custom date hierarchy for year-month-week hierarchy · Issue #74 · microsoft/powerbi-visuals-timeline (github.com)

Hi,

There is now a newer version of the timeline slicer (2.4.0) that supports switching to ISO weeks 🎉
Have a look at the "Week determination standards" setting.

ISO Week support

Hi,

Have you tried using Fiscal Year Start and Fiscal Day of Week?

Ignat Vilesov,

Software Engineer

Microsoft Power BI Custom Visuals

[email protected]

We've implemented the workaround with setting the fiscal year to the 4th of January.
That gives us the right weeks for this year, but that messes up our year (it thinks it's 2022 when you need data over 2021).
Hopefully a fix is in the works

I'm in need of more ISO options as I need to be able to use June 1st as Week 1 as I have issues with my reports. June 1st was a Saturday and my work week starts on Sunday so the weeks are messed up. Is there any means to get more ISO's or a fix for the Timeline Slicer?