Forum Discussion
Formatting SSAS values (Live connection/explore live)
SSAS is a semantic layer in BI. This means it stores metadata natively with data. Part of this metadata is display formatting. Power View (the report component in Power BI) is designed, for better or worse, to defer to the display format metadata of its source. You should alter these display formats in your SSAS model.
SSAS is a semantic layer in BI. This means it stores metadata natively with data. Part of this metadata is display formatting. Power View (the report component in Power BI) is designed, for better or worse, to defer to the display format metadata of its source. You should alter these display formats in your SSAS model.
I am seeing for some Visuals they ignore the formatting specified by SSAS MDX. Things like providing 2 decimal points which don't show up in any other client tools.
My experience is that the visualizations Table and Matrix actively uses "Standard" format string on measures that, in the source, are configured without format string. My expectation was "No specific format" (like Excel's "General"). To accomplish the thousand separator and skip decimal places, I set FORMAT_STRING = "#,##0"
Also, even though on live connection, I see that vizualizations like KPI provides the option to specify "Value decimal places" (Format > Indicator).
Hope this is helpful.
Thanks for the info!
Gotcha. I was wondering if PowerBI could format the values like Tableau could with SSAS cubes.
Some visuals appear to have limited formatting. Eg, if you click the format painter on a bar chart and expand the options for the X-Axis you will have the ability to control Display Units (Auto/None/Thousands/Millions etc) as well as the Decimal places.
But if you have a grid of data and want to have full control over each column that doesn't appear to be available yet. You can always submit an idea (I will vote for you).
For now, the live connection to the MDX cube doesn't seem to always use the format_string values from the cube which is a shame.
Same problem here!
I tried to play around with SSAS format masks but they are not interpreted on Power BI Desktop when using live connections.
The only change I have seen is by converting to data to use Currency data type, the format is changes with thousands separators and 2 decimal places.
Has an issue been registered so far so that I can vote for it too?
This unfotunately is no longer working. I agree with the semantic layer concept but since November 2016, Power BI is no longer taking into account the SSAS formatting contains in the metadata. Please
