Forum Discussion
Microsoft EmployeeShare your thoughts on visual calculations (preview)
Responsive ResidentI've already got a win from this. There was a requirement for a specific dimension to count its items without disambiguation. So, a matrix with measure totals one way and visual totals the other. This could probably be solved before, but I'm never sure I've done a filter manipulation right or if I've left myself some surprise for later.
Hopefully the restrictions will fall, in particular export will be something that will mean a few places I could have used this will have to wait. I was hoping to crack on with conditional formatting - my model has plenty of measures which format a single visual and it would be nice to clear those up. I can work around this more easily.
One concern is that I would like to maintain visibility into what I've written. DAX Query View has finally made it easy to look after measures and columns. The ability to have visibility into what I've written would make me more confident in using the feature.
I'm also wondering if hidden columns in general could piggy-back off this feature? I'd love to hide the ugly compound keys that power drill-through pages.
Microsoft Employeehello and thanks for the feedback. It's great to hear you are making good use of this already! Conditional formatting is absolutely on the list of things we want to work on. On top of that, we are using visual calculations as a way to develop new functionality and paradigms and plan to evaluate what we build there to see where it might apply to the rest of the product. Hidden is a prime example of that.
What are you thoughts on what you'd like to see for the visibility you mentioned?
- lbendlin
Super User
Hidden is a prime example of that.For me this discussion is similar to the one we had when windowing functions were new. With the difference that those do allow you to reach back into the data model.
Is it already mentioned anywhere that hiding fields only seems to be possible with On-Object enabled?
- jeroenterheerdt
that's not supposed to happen. I can hide fields fine without on-object on. Can you show a screenshot?
- lbendlin
Oh. You can only hide the visual calculations, not the other columns?
- kleigh
I've already mentioned a drill-through column that does not need to be visible. As well as inside the visual, this also affects exports. Some people will use white text as a work-around to achieve a "hidden" column visually, but then the data appears in the exports.
Sometimes, I want to force all rows to appear - Power BI will automatically collapse rows that are the "same" which is correct for summaries but less useful when investigating the data. Having a hidden key field would ensure rows are separate while leaving the space for columns related to the investigation.
When using columns in cell elements like "Web URL" from a related table, this does not work correctly if no columns from the related table are in the table visual and the columns are only used in the elements. Having a hidden column from the related table would force a correct model and allow the use of these fields. Currently I'm duplicating the column in my main table.
One way of sorting on multiple columns is to create a compound sort key and use that as a column. While full sorting would be better, these columns would be better hidden when they are used.
I've previously taken some notes on this based on the Ideas site. Other requests I've seen include:
- Control of columns by bookmark (better than two tables swapped by bookmark; allows optional "big" fields like a notes field or compact display).
- Control by measure (e.g. to hide all blank columns, or select by user role)
- Hiding wide key columns like UUID by default (I'm not sold on this one, seems it would be confusing)
- Columns are selected by drill level
- User controls to switch columns on and off. (Though how this would interact with field parameters is a good question...)
- jeroenterheerdt
thank you. we are working through the export story at the moment, so this is really useful input.
