Collation of data and summarising totals based on criteria

[CatHeaps]

Hello.  This is my first time posting and I am new to Power BI.   I am a user of Excel and can pull together some formulas to summarise budgets, spend and variances.   I am struggling in Power BI though.  

I have attached an image of the final summary of information.  As you can see there are several sources of data (Tables of data which are actually tabs on an excel spreadsheet) that I need to pull in to one view.   Budget.  Spend to Date.  Forecast.   Variance.   I have established relationships but don't really know where to go from there on how to display/pull it all in to one view.  

I am trawling the internet for advice, but think I am asking the wrong questions.  If anyone can point me in the right direction, it would be very much appreciated.  Mybe on how to breakdown the requirements then build back up.

[v-yanjiang-msft]

Hi @CatHeaps ,

Has @AlexisOlson's solution solved your problem? If yes, please kindly accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ kalyj

[AlexisOlson]

Power BI isn't really designed to build composite tables like this in a single visual. It's not impossible but you'll have to do quite a bit of work to smash it all together and even then you might not be happy with this formatting. If you have a choice in the matter, I'd recommend not trying to make Power BI be something it isn't designed to be.

As a side note, it is possible to publish Excel to a Power BI workspace. See here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/service-publish-from-excel

(I'm not necessarily recommending this, just mentioning it as a possibility.)

[CatHeaps]

Thanks for the heads up.  I less precious about the format of the table and more interested in being able to show the results.  I.e.  Drill in to a project, see its spend, its forecast and its variance.  However, I am struggling with the calculations.  My actuals and my forecasts are in one table, but my budget is in another.  I also can have different tasks in each of those tables and want to merge the total number of different tasks in to one table and display the results for each of them. Thanks for helping me think differently about the end result, it will help me approach the solution in a different way. 

[AlexisOlson]

Just to be clear, I was primarily talking about the visual formatting. If you ignore the top two rows in your screenshot, you can likely build a matrix visual of (most of) the rest where each column is a separate measure. Having measures defined on different tables isn't a problem so long as you have dimension tables (e.g. dimDate, dimProject) tying everything together.