Organising Measures in Power BI

[Pragati11]

Power BI has been improving on monthly basis and we get to learn new features in this tool every now and then.

Recently working within a project I felt an extreme need of organizing my measures in some way. I ended up adding so many measures based on the requirements that my original dataset started looking messy. I recently came across Measure tables term in Power BI. Trust me, this measure table is an amazing way to organize all the measure calculations, specially when you have so many of them in your report.

Today in this blog I will take you through the steps of creating these measure tables in Power BI by taking a simple example. 

Consider the following dataset where in the screesnhot you see the part of the table. Here you can see that I have got few measures, though I have got more:

Our task is to somehow organise these measures at a single location so that they can be easily managed.

We will start by creating a table in Power BI using the ENTER DATA option:

The following window appears and give the following entries as shown and hit LOAD:

You will see a table is created under fields pane as MEASUREDOMAIN which has got a TestColumn in it:

Now create a test measure in this table as follows and you end up with following:

Now we will hide the only column in this table by right clicking on it and choosing HIDE option:

We end up with just a measure in this table:

Refresh the FIELDS PANE section now. This can be done by using the arrow in this pane by collapsing it and then expanding it again. See below:

You will see that the MEASUREDOMAIN table has landed to the top under FIELDS Pane with a new MEASURE icon:

So, we have successfully created a measure table, where we can organize our measures.

The only step now we need to do is move all our measures from the base CLOTHINGSALES table to MEASUREDOMAIN table.

Follow the steps in the short gif below to move all the measures:

I have shown how we can move AverageSales measure from CLOTHINGSALES to MEASUREDOMAIN table. 

Once I move all the measure, I get the following:

We can see that the CLOTHINGSALES table is much cleaner and less messy. You can now delete the TestMeasure that we created earlier.

All the measures are under MEASUREDOMAIN table and easy to track and manage.

Trust me this is a brilliant way to organise measures in your Power BI report and will make your life much easier specially in the scenarios where you end up having so many measure calculations on a single Power BI report.

Hope this helps everyone out there.

- Pragati

[AllisonKennedy]

Thanks @Pragati11 

I have seen lots of reports full of many, many measures that are challenging to search through. This post will definitely help lots of users, and how cool is it that a table with only measures floats to the top of the Fields pane? 

One thing I've recently discovered that I think is pretty cool is that you can actually use Ctrl to select multiple measures at once! I thought this wasn't possible but the secret is to switch to the Model view first. Then you can actually drag and drop measures from one table into another, and you can also use Display Folders for even greater organization! 

[Pragati11]

Hi @AllisonKennedy ,

Thank you so much for taking out time to go through my blog.

You are absolutely right, the blog is missing few add-on tricks like the ones you mentioned-

• Use CTRL to select multiple measures at a time to move directly to the measure table
• Display folders can also be created for organising the measures

I am now so very promoted to write a PART II of this blog with these 2 additional features.

Thanks again! Feedback is much appreciated! 🙂

Thanks,

Pragati

[Nolock]

Hello @Pragati11,

before you start writing the second part, please read the following 2 posts: 

• https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/How-To-A-Table-for-Custom-Report-Measures/ba-p/11452...
• https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/Display-Folder-Property-in-Power-BI-Desktop/bc-p/106...

They already contain a big part of what you are up to.

[Pragati11]

Hi @Nolock ,

Thanks for pointing me to these already existing blogs. Looks like they are already there 🙂

Thanks,

Pragati

[DavisBI]

Hi, @Pragati11 ,

I like this idea! I consider developing a tool that can automatic done this task, and I think it's possible 🙂

[billa_dee]

Brilliant, this can be further organised in to folders 

Measures in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

[Pragati11]

HI @billa_dee ,

Yes something like this: