Sorting by Column Not In Visual When Data Source is Another Report

[TimNYC]

I'm using Power BI on desktop and my data source is another Power BI report that is already in the cloud. Because the data source is from a different file, I do not have access to the "Data" tab on the left and the "Sort By Column" option is greyed out. The field that I would like to sort my visual by is in the same table as one of the fields used in my visual. How do I access that column for sorting?

The table has the following data. The field shown on the visual is "Time Range", but I'd like to sort on the field "Hour". Sorting by "Time Range" results in non-chronological sorting because it is a text field.

Hour	Time	Time Range
0	12:00 AM	12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
1	1:00 AM	1:00 AM - 2:00 AM
2	2:00 AM	2:00 AM - 3:00 AM
etc.	etc.	etc.

Any help on this would be appriciated, thank you.

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

Well, depending on the visual you could add Hour to your visual and then use the ellipses in your visual to sort by Hour. You can often shrink up this column so that it does not show in something like a table visual. What visual is this going in?

[TimNYC]

Thank you everyone for your replies. The visual I'm using with the XX:00 AM - XX:00 - AM filed a simple table, so adding the Hour column, shrinking it to zero width, and sorting on that will get the job done. I do wish there was a better way, after all adding extra values to a visual can sometimes cause problems.

[bfernandez]

You can sort the visual by selecting its More options (...) menu, select Sort by, and then select the field by which you want to sort.

Check out the Power BI documentation here.

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[Anonymous]

Yes, my apologies, I thought the original poster was trying to sort by a column that wasn't on the visual. In that case, you need to add the "sort by another column" option in PBI desktop, which doesn't appear when you live connect to a dataset.

If the value you want to sort by is on the visual itself, just sort by that using the options under the ellipses as indicated.

Thx,

Scott

[Anonymous]

Hi @TimNYC , if you mean you're live connecting to a Power BI dataset, unfortunately you won't be able to change the sort order. That's part of the data model, and when you're live connected you don't have "edit" access to the model to make changes (even for things like display formats...which I really don't understand why I can't override those when live connecting).

Hope this helps,

Scott