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MaartenH's avatar
MaartenH
Frequent Visitor
10 years ago
Solved

Power BI doesn't use decimals

Hi,   Been trying all afternoon to get a dashboard together. Problem is that when I upload data with amounts like 2.5 & 3.6,  the dasboard adds these up in a graph/table etc. as 2 + 3 = 5 instead ...
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  • MaartenH's avatar
    MaartenH
    10 years ago

    Never mind, 

    In the edit query I found that in the "applied steps" window i made 2 (historic) alterations for the data, first I made it a "whole numer" then a couple steps later a "decimal"....deleted the first step and the data came through ok. 

     

    Solved, -1 kudo for meself!

     

    thanx for the input though!

MaartenH's avatar
MaartenH
Frequent Visitor
10 years ago

Sorry, it does round it, but the problem is that at a certain point the amounts in the excel are, for example: 

 

0.02

 

Power BI rounds that to zero. 

 

I have around 60 K-rows with amount €0.02 wich is 1.2 k€, for my purpose reporting thats a material difference :-) 

sdjensen's avatar
sdjensen
Icon for Solution Sage rankSolution Sage
10 years ago

I never liked to use excel as a source for my data. Could you try to save your data excel sheet as a csv file instead and use this as a source and see what you get.

  • MaartenH's avatar
    MaartenH
    Frequent Visitor
    10 years ago

    I'm new to Power BI, for the moment my data comes from Excel file (looking to link it directly to ERP database/in cloud applications in the future). Would you advise to always save the Excel data in CSV format? 

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      10 years ago

      I believe the reason for the csv recommendation is that excel carries a bunch of formatting baggage that can hide little surprises (numbers that come in as text perhaps). A csv file is an unformatted text file. The fewer moving parts in the machine, the fewer places you have to look when there's a problem. Is that about right sdjensen?

      • sdjensen's avatar
        sdjensen
        Icon for Solution Sage rankSolution Sage
        10 years ago
        Anonymous wrote:

        I believe the reason for the csv recommendation is that excel carries a bunch of formatting baggage that can hide little surprises (numbers that come in as text perhaps). A csv file is an unformatted text file. The fewer moving parts in the machine, the fewer places you have to look when there's a problem. Is that about right sdjensen?

        Anonymous - yes that is right. Many years since I stopped using Excel as source in SSIS packages, but I don't know if there is any similar issues with importing from Excel in Power BI, so it was just an suggestion (a long shot) to try to find the problem here.