Forum Discussion
Measures in a separate table
- 9 years ago
This is not an uncommon practice. Not sure about the icon, but you could create a Blank query, not add any steps and save it. Then, add measures to that "table". Measures are table inspecific, so they can technically live anywhere.
That model seems to have been inherited (imported?) from the Excel version of that Portfolio Slicer - the Report table is a single row/single column table, effectively built via "Enter Data" feature.
There was some discussion recently on the topic in this forum thread: Re: How to keep the model tidy?
And it's also touched on in this Idea: Grouping Fields into dimensions and measure
And there's discussion of accessing the PBI data model here: How to hack yourself in Power BI (and Power Pivot?)
Historically, I think the recommended practice in SSAS etc. was to group Measures with Fact tables on granularity, but I wonder if that's still relevant for Power BI? I'm not sure if it scales, and it breaks the drill-through PivotTable feature in Excel to have measures separate from the table, but it could be simpler for business users to navigate with all measures in one place, some Measures use mutliple tables anyway and, if you re-create a table by changing the query, it can trash any measures you've added to it!
In the webinar How to Design Visually Stunning Reports, Miguel Myers makes a point of surfacing Measure descriptions as Tooltip helpers on his reports. And Excel etc. let you record a Measure description, wheras Power BI currently does not.
Until a baked-in solution for documenting measures is released, I can see a case for a "Measures" or "Report" table to hold the Description of each measure, as well as the measures themselves. If it scales...
- TonyR9 years agoFrequent Visitor
Thank you Steve for the detail response. Much appreciciated. I'll check out the links