Advice on report design

[Anonymous]

Hi,

So I have a report for two seperate divisions within the company - I created them based off the same data source which was one excel file.
However, the data source has changed to two seoerate spreadsheets for the divisions.
This means that the report now has repeated pages but with different values, but also the dax measures are all doubled and will always be.

I was unsure as to whether that is a bad idea - to have double of everything or is it still okay if the data sources being combined are an issue?

Should I try to avoid double of everuything or is it not a big issue?

[AlexisOlson · Accepted solution]

Usually, the way to handle this is to append your data sources together so that you don't need more measures. You may want to add a division column to each source before appending (if one doesn't already exist) so that you can easily slice by that column to return the data from one division or the other.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Are the column names and structure the same for both tables? Please make sure this.

Then you can add a divisions column to both tables to differentiate between the two tables.

For DAX you could use UNION() function and for Power Query you could use append feature.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dax/union-function-dax 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/append-queries 

Best Regards,

Jay

[AlexisOlson · Accepted solution]

Usually, the way to handle this is to append your data sources together so that you don't need more measures. You may want to add a division column to each source before appending (if one doesn't already exist) so that you can easily slice by that column to return the data from one division or the other.

[Anonymous]

Hi thank you for your help. 

That has helped however, certain columns are not merging and im not to sure how to fix the problem.

For example, I have a country column in both but it wont combine the values. So i now have two country columns in the appended table, is there any way to fix this. the only difference in the two is the values.

[AlexisOlson]

Are you sure the names of the columns are identical? UPPERCASE and lowercase make a difference as does any whitespace in the column names.

[Anonymous]

Yes they are identical but still won't combine certain columns.
Thank you for your help.