Column Naming Conventions

[Newcolator]

Hello All

I'm building a Power BI dashboard and I'm realising I need to think more carefully about my column names to prevent confusion later as they are difficult to change down the road.

Some are simple, like "Claim Number" and "Accident Date". But there are certain classes of columns that I'd like to relate by name. For example I have lots of columns that contain 0/1 indicators that I can sum up to get counts. Do you have a preferred prefix or suffix for these? I could use "Count", or "Ind", but I wondered if you had any ideas.

Also, I have columns that contain percentages, so again "Perc" (I don't like this for some reason), or "Percentage" (bit long) or "Ratio" (hmm), or "%" (yuk).

And there are columns that contain Y/N. "Flag" perhaps?

Perhaps my suffix should be a prefix, to group them all alphabetically, so.

Count Claim

Count Closed

Count Nil

But then Claim Count, Closed Count and Nil Count sound better.

As well as the columns in the imported data tables I've also created measures in Power BI that are calculated on aggregrated data, I'm wondering if these should have a common name too.

and so on.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

Thanks and regards.

[v-easonf-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi， @Newcolator 

Currently, PowerBI does not have many constraints on column naming conventions. It depends on personal habits. No matter how you name it, just make sure you can find it easily.

In addition,  you can also create measure tables  to hold these measures in order to find them easily.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Eason