Forum Discussion
Hide/Show Column in Table Visual Matrix on Report
The easy way to have the years show, or not show, is to have a good data model design. If you have 1 column of data for every year in the underlying source table, this won’t work. This is also not a good design. Instead you should unpivot the data into 2 columns, one that states the year and the other that has the values. Then you place the year column from the table I to the columns in the matrix, and it will do what you want.
Thanks; I'll try it for this table and report back.
More generally, I've heard of the concept of "long and thin" data; the problem I see with that approach, though, is that if you have a table with many rows, the "long" part of the table becomes very long and unmanageable. It's much easier to work with the pivot table - so I guess that in that case, you have to wait until absolutely the last moment before you unpivot it.
What do you mean “unmanageable”? Power BI is a database. It is not intended that you work with the source data. The idea is that you load the data into an appropriate table structure (data model) and then interact via visuals. I have data models with 100 million rows of data and it is perfectly manageable.
Sigh... I guess my (mental) transition from Excel to PBI is not going to be as smooth as I was hoping:mansad:
One day I'll get it, maybe - thanks for the input.