Forum Discussion
Calculating a Total Based on Start/End Dates
Greg_Deckler I may be incorrect and I would defer to your judgment for sure on that, but I'm going to ask for clarification for myself because unless I am mistaken the link you posted converts the days, hours, and seconds to numbers and then sticks them in a custom format to generate the appearance of duration. I know duration is supported in Power Query (M): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/duration-functions, but it seems your article follows a similar process to the link I posted.
Community ChampionAnonymous - Both Power Query and Power BI's representation of Dates, Time and Duration is a trick. It's all just decimal numbers. You can provie this to yourself in Power Query if you right-click a "Duration" column and switch it to decimal number. You get a decimal number. Switch it back, it is magically a duration. Dates and Times in DAX are the same trick, it's just a decimal number behind the scenes.
So, converting somethingt that is formatted as a duration to a number, it's just a matter of whether it happens automatically or not. The problem that was fixed by Chelsie Eiden is that Power BI had no capability to display an aggregation as a duration format. So, even if you converted something to a number, added it up, etc. you had to convert it back to text to display it as a duration. Chelsie Eiden fixed that in Power BI so that you can have a number but display it as a duration, just like you can have a number and display it as a date.
I could actually argue this both ways. One, Power BI always supported duration because duration is just a decimal number. Conversely, Power BI never supported duration until Chelsie Eiden because you could never display an actual duration format, it always had to be converted to text. Either way, in my opinion, Power BI now supports Durations post Chelsie Eiden's work whereas previously it did not. I think you might be getting hung up on the fact that "duration" is not a "native data type". Well, it isn't in Power Query either because internally it is just a decimal number. Is duration in Power BI Desktop as nice and friendly as in Power Query? No, but it is definitely good enough to check the box of being supported.