Forum Discussion
Post ProdigyMay 2017 Power BI Update
Hello Power BI,
Amanda Cofsky in her recent May 2017 Post: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/author/amac/ states that new Table and Matrix preview visuals have been updated to use new URL types and Icons.
If you have one of these link types in your data, and mark the column’s data category as Web URL, we will open the application you picked when the link is clicked. For example, if you set Outlook as your mail client, Outlook will open a new email if you click on a mailto link.
You can also use icons instead of the entire link in your tables by using the URL icon option in the Values card of the formatting pane.
What about the Matrix Visual being able to use URL icons?
The Matrix visual is not useful and is a big problem to use becouse it does not allow URL's to be Icons and so you get stuck with a long ugly useless matrix table if there is any hyperlink fields being used in it.
3 Replies
v-caliao-msftMicrosoft Employee
Based on my research, this is actually by design.
The intent here is that for Table, each row tells you roughly what the like is about, so showing an Icon can be useful. In Matrix, however, we support showing URL icons for Column/Row headers. Having an icon would totally obscure the link and we felt it would be ambiguous. Please refer to the link below to see Ramy's reply.
http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/Hyperlink-icon-missing-for-Matrix-tables/idi-p/135179If you have any concern on this feature, you can submit your idea on the link below. If this feature was mentioned by mulitple users, product team will consider to add this feature to next release.
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideasRegards,
Charlie Liao
lcaseyHello Charile.
Thanks for this info. I will try using the Matrix with the column URL icon "on" and see if I can produce the results needed. Basically, the end result is to be able to drill down into data, then retrieve all electronical documentation behind it. So the URL link is needed to open documentation.
Not only is it valuable seeing the metadata of the data that is being anaylized, but equally as important to easily retrieve documentation around the metadata. Links play a very important role in document retrieval.
I think there is potential to use this with Great Plains 2016 and produce Financial reports as they do in Power BI for Dynamics 365.
Although, with the new APP model, it may become easier to open and link to other reports quickly as a sub-report.
Visuals themselves will become more web compliant allowing HTML 5 standards I suspect. The visuals could then pop out into sub reports using perhaps a whole new query, they could fade-in and have HTML 5 like affects with CSS formating and transitionl effects.
With this new move to the APP model my opinion has changed. This was a great move that now integrates Power BI into the cloud fabric in a way that wasnt possible before. I think we will see some major updates and functionality coming more rapidly now.
I hope that Microsoft Sway and Power BI Teams coordinate together to come up with some designs and really useful integration between the two products.
- lcasey
Ok I just tried using this function and it simply doesnt have any use for what I am talking about.
Its the Value field that needs to be formated as URL. I dont see why this was decided not to be done. The Column formating in a Matrix as a URL is the least useful place to have a URL Icon.
A table easily has a URL Icon in the values, I simply dont understand why this would also not be the case with a a Matrix.