Smart Narrative & Calculation Groups incompatibility

[pmcmonag]

There is a bug in the smart narrative visual honouring text formatted measures, when in combination with calculation groups. The root cause seems to be where custom format strings are set in calculation groups which causes ALL measures in model to be set to Data Type Variant. 

Other visuals struggled with this previously as per the issue psoted below, I'm not sure if that is fully resolved but in the dummy dataset card visuals seem to work fine with dynamic text string measures, but not the smart narrative visual....and it's not GA. 

https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=9d9e204a-db28-4ced-89f9-ea56a1041a06

Further discussion:

https://github.com/otykier/TabularEditor/issues/380

dummy pbix 

[v-chuncz-msft]

@pmcmonag 

A similar issue has been reported internally, so stay tuned.

CRI 234439474

[zzakir]

@pmcmonag @v-chuncz-msft Is there an update to it? I was using one of my text measures as dynamic text in a text box and it was coming up with no result. Same measure (used under the same context) works fine on another visual like a card or a table. I don't want to delete the calculation group that I am using  since I will have rebuilt a lot of content on the report because of that. Is there a temporary workaround? or do we have an update on if CRI 234439474? How can I see CRI 234439474?

[pmcmonag]

@zzakir @v-chuncz-msft  I was hoping to see a fix in the June desktop update but no luck! The smart narrative did break in the service a few days ago for several users (as reported on twitter). Maybe some development was happening related to this?

[zzakir]

@pmcmonag This is unfortunate. Is this issue also addressed on another thread where I can follow it? I just find it hard to believe that we are the only ones who have ran into this issue so far. 

[edhans]

I do not think this is 100% the same thing, but am linking back to this issue as I believe it to be related. Mere existence of a Calculation Group causes Smart... - Microsoft Power BI Community

[lasersharks]

Any update on this issue?

[charrington]

Same here...smart narratives are used more and more often to add extra context to dashboards, and "texts" must be included as well, this isn't only for numeric values at all. And of course calculation groups are everywhere since they are so useful, so we need to two components working.
I know there is not a lot of votes on this, but still there might be many people/org impacted, it's just that it's hard to find the cause and understand the why of this issue.   

@v-chuncz-msft Please fix this!

[lasersharks]

This is still broken... any update?

[edhans]

Nope. Still broken. Known issue. Might be fixed someday. 🤣

They are working on new visuals (new card viz, curves in line charts, and more) so I am hopeful we will get a "new smart narrative" that can handle variant data types without blanking out.

[Rajatt]

I know it took a while but this is fixed now https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-september-2023-feature-summary/#post-24646-_Toc145...