Is there a way to display a category count as "less than #" if the count is less than a value?

[JManfredini]

Hello wonderful BI-ers, 

I am working with FERPA protected data and cannot display the count of a demographic category if the count is very small, because the person/people in that category might be able to be identified. 

So instead, I want to display the count of a category as "less than 5" if the count is less than five, but retain the numeric count values for categories where the count is over five. This count would be in a tooltip. In other words: when I hover over a column in my bar chart, I want to display a text value if the count is under a threshold, and a numeric value if the count is over a threshold. 

Here is a sample of the data (not actual numbers):

Year	Race	Count
2020	White	189
2020	Black	27
2020	Asian	89
2020	Other	2
2019	White	234
2019	Black	54
2019	Asian	4
2019	Other	6

So in this case, when I hover over the bar for [Year=2020  Race=Other], and [Year=2019 Race=Asian], Instead of the tooltip displaying "2" and "4" respecively, I see "Less than 5" (or "< 5"). 

I have a tooltip set up right now displaying counts in categories, what I'm asking is about displaying those values as text based on a condition. 

Is this possible? 

[d_gosbell · Accepted solution]

I don't believe this is currently possible with the default tips in the on-prem report server unless you used a custom tooltip with a different measure.

If you are deploying to the Power BI service you could use the new dynamic format strings feature Create dynamic format strings for measures in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Learn and create a format string like 

if( SELECTEDMEASURE() < 5, "Less than 5", "#,0.00")

Otherwise you could create and additional measure with an expression like:

[Reported Person Count] =  if( [Person Count] < 5, "Less than 5", [Person Count])

But you would probably also have to create a custom tooltip as the default one will always show the value for the original measure and you cannot add the measure above to a barchart as it cannot graph the "Less than 5" text.

[JManfredini]

Thanks for this advice! Unfortunately I don't have Desktop, only Report Service. This is a cool feature (if only I could use it).