Durations

[Anonymous]

Hi,

What is the best way to represent durations in PBI?

I need to represent a long process durations.

Currently the durations represents as days, and it works good to describe the all process because usually it can take more then few days, but When drilling down to step in the process It becomes not understandable to the user because each step in the process can take several minutes, (20m = 0.013d).

In addition, it couldn't be string since I need sort/aggregate this column.

Thanks in advance to the assistants.

[Anonymous]

HI  @Anonymous,

In fact, I do not so recommend you to use a larger unit to store small value, these values accuracy will be reduced during unit conversion.

In my opinion, I will use a small unit(total second) to record these values and use the expression to calculate correspond conversion results if necessary.

Calculation priority: aggregation > transform. (Notice: do aggregation on values before unit conversion, it can reduce the deviation caused with unit conversion)

Aggregating Duration Time 

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[az38]

Hi @Anonymous 

in power query editor mode you can set Data type as Duration for your field

according https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-data-types 

Duration – Represents a length of time. It’s converted into a Decimal Number Type when loaded into the model. As a Decimal Number type it can be added or subtracted from a Date/Time field with correct results. As a Decimal Number type, you can easily use it in visualizations that show magnitude.

---

do not hesitate to give a kudo to useful posts and mark solutions as solution

LinkedIn

[Anonymous]

Thanks but decimal is not good enought for me because this number can be days or minutes, it not understandable to the end user when the report shows 0.0013 days.