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jbhwcm
Advocate I
Advocate I

Adding Gridlines to Matrix columns

I am trying to add borders/gridlines to separate the years in a date hierarchy for a matrix (as seen below).  Is there any way to do this? When i turn gridlines on, it applies to each column, is there a way to only do it for the years?

 

borders.jpg

11 REPLIES 11
Chuka
Frequent Visitor

Voted for this feature, strange why we cant do this easily.

helppeople
New Member

Hi everyone,

For a vertical separator, you can use the following workaround:

- Create a measure that returns a blank (example: Separator Measure = BLANK() )

- add it as a column where you need the separator to be

- rename the label to a “.”

- change the Font color and Background color to be the exact same.

- resize the column to the desired size (I normally shrink as much as it allows me to).

If you need more separators just add the same measure to the table or matrix again.

 

I hope this helps until the PBI teams provides with a proper way of accomplishing this.

It sucks that this is not a basic feature but this workaround is perfetct! Just add blank measure with blank name in matrix and set background of this column to a desired color! Thanks a lot for this tip!

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi @parry2k that unfortunately gives each field in the matrix value area's column a border, the OP was asking if a border can be added to just the column field which is encompassing the values.

 

I can't seem to find a solution to this either.

gidster99
Frequent Visitor

I would also like to be able to do this... or at least some way of better distinguishing the column groupings (in your case, the Years)

I too would like have such a feature to add border to specific column in matrix view

@SH-VE @jbhwcm @gidster99  this can be achieve by turning on vertical grid and you can set the color the grid line and the thickness

 

image.png



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v-lili6-msft
Community Support
Community Support

HI, @jbhwcm

     After my research, I'm afraid it couldn't achieve in Power BI for now.

But you can color the total column to achieve your requirement.

For example:

select matrix visual

then click Format->Subtotals->Font color and Format->Grand Total->Font color

1.PNG2.PNG

Result:

3.PNG

Best Regards,

Lin

Community Support Team _ Lin
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

This idea to use subtotals column to separate quarters worked pretty well for me.  I simply changed the text format background to match the font color so that it appears there are no values.  Ended up with something as shown below (grey columns separate quarters in the year).  thanks!

Power BI calendar with qtr separators.PNG


@v-lili6-msft wrote:

     After my research, I'm afraid it couldn't achieve in Power BI for now.

>2 years later and we still can't do this - is there any plan to implement this? I would also like to be able to do it.

 

In my case I want gridlines separating each row at the top level of my row hierarchy, without separating the sublevels.

 

i.e. Say I have a 'UserId' field and an 'OrderId' field. Each 'UserId' can have 1 or many 'OrderId's associated with it. I want to count the number of 'Items' in each order and subsequently the total number of 'Items' ordered by each user, so I have 'UserId' and 'OrderId' as different row levels. I should be able to have gridlines separating the 'UserId' field without also separating the 'OrderId' field, but the Matrix visual formatting options don't stretch this far. The same should be possible for columns.

 

This seems like it should be a pretty important design feature of a 'pivot table' style visual to help as a visual aid and I'm surprised Microsoft could overlook this so easily.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I've added this as an idea for future visuals:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Custom-Visuals-Ideas/Adding-major-and-minor-gridlines-to-matrix-col...

 

Go and vote on it, so that it can be implemented.

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