SSAS MDX Cube attributes display differently than in Excel

[Promethes_2]

Hello,

We have a live connection to an SSAS MDX cube and the common complaint I get from my end users when browsing the cube is the keycolumn / valuecolumn values showing up in Power BI Desktop. This confuses end users as to which attribute to pick and ideally I'd like to hide the keycolumn attribute and only show the value column attribute. 

For example, in Power BI Desktop, browsing the Date Dimension, I see the Date attribute key column and Date.Value value column attributes which is confusing my end users (screenshot below):

However, when I browse the same cube from Excel, the users aren't presented with both the key and name column value attributes (screen shot below).

Is there a way I can get this same fidelity from Power BI?  There doesn't appear to be a way from the cube level to hide just the key column attribute, although I can hide the value column attribute which is not what end users desire (in most cases).

I'm curious how others are handling this.

Thanks!

[v-caliao-msft]

Hi @Promethes_2,

I have tested it on my local environment, we can get the same result as yours. Based on my research, Power BI will show the Namecolumn and Valuevolumn if you have set the two column in your ssas cube.

So if you want only name column show on your Power BI, you need to set the ValueColumn to none in your SSAS project.

Reference
https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3271/sql-server-analysis-server-ssas-keycolumn-vs-namecolumn-...

Regards,

Charlie Liao

[Promethes_2]

And I meant to add:

Why does Excel only show the ValueColumn attribute, yet Power BI shows both (key and value column)?  It seems like Power BI is doing somthing differently than Excel when displaying the cube attributes given the screenshots provided. 

[tannera]

I'm having the same issue, did you find a workaround? 

[Promethes_2]

Hi Charlie,

Thank you for the information.  My issue is that from a display perspective the valuecolumn is the desired format for the end users but they get confused on Date vs Date.Value.

 

If I remove the ValueColumn the format is not in the desired format:

If I remove the NameColumn then again, the issue is Date vs Date.Value for end-users to muddle through.

So it appears there isn't a way to display the date in the format desired without having to display 2 attributes (date, date.value)?  This seems a little flawed to me and I'm wondering if people simple accept this and train end users to deal with it.  I dont' see the value in having both display  if only 1 is used for reporting display purposes.