**Business Need:** For Finance and Analytics departments, a core reporting requirement is the creation of structured financial statements (P&L, Balance Sheets) and variance analysis reports. A standard practice in these reports is to place certain measures (e.g., time intelligence like YTD, QTD) to the left of the descriptive row headers, while other measures (e.g., scenarios like Actual, Plan, Budget, Variance) are placed to the right. This layout is intuitive, universally understood, and standard practice in tools like Excel. **Current Limitation:** The native Power BI Matrix visual has a rigid structure that forces all value columns to appear to the right of all row header columns. This makes it impossible to create these standard, asymmetric financial layouts natively. The current workarounds—either using two separate, manually-aligned visuals or procuring a third-party custom visual—add significant development complexity, maintenance overhead, and potential cost. **Proposed Solution:** Enhance the properties of the native Matrix visual to allow for flexible column placement. A potential implementation could be to add an option in the formatting pane or a right-click context menu on the fields in the "Columns" field well. This option, such as "Display position: Left / Right," would allow a report developer to designate whether a specific measure or column should be rendered to the left or the right of the row headers. **Benefit:** Implementing this feature would be a monumental improvement for the Finance user base. It would make Power BI a more complete, out-of-the-box solution for enterprise-grade financial reporting, significantly reducing the reliance on workarounds and empowering finance teams to build critical reports more efficiently.
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