How to get roles/departments assigned from column values

[Nanakwame]

Hi All,

I am very new to power bi. I a table with department names as columns. I am trying to make those department names as filters within my dashboard. Any ideas how i can transfrom that to generate a filter?

Thank you 

[samdthompson]

Hello, this is probably a good first step to watch to get a handle on how to make your first report:

Power BI Tutorial From Beginner to Pro ⚡ Desktop to Dashboard in 60 Minutes ⏰ - YouTube

[samdthompson · Accepted solution]

Hello, this is best attacked in PowerQuery. you will need to unpivot the columns. This will get create a list of the departments which you can use as a filter. Not sure of what the data looks like but you may need to do a few more transformations. Heres a link on unpivoting in power query: Unpivot columns (Power Query) (microsoft.com)

[Nanakwame]

@samdthompson 

The columns contain ID numbers and values that will be used for dax calculations. Is there a secondary table i can possible create to house the department names? Not sure how i can make that link to the main table. 

[samdthompson]

Without actually seeing how the data hangs together, DAX would use those column names better if they were on rows. You might have a table, for example with:

 
Month, Department, Amount, ID 

Your DAX would then be comething like SUM(Table1,Amount) or DISTINCTCOUNT(Table[ID]) . With a date table and a department table connected you can then start building some more complex measures with prior year calcultions etc.