Error Fetching Data for Visual - Matrix

[nmanley03]

Not sure if I'm posting this in the right place, but wanted to highlight an error I came across today - in an attempt to potentially understand it better.

I've had a sales dashboard live for the past 8 months on Power BI service, which I've been developing in Power BI desktop. However, this morning, I started getting widespread errors in my Matrix visuals on the published version - 'Error Fetching Data For Visual'.

Activity ID: 8ea8d8e5-9838-4c2a-ba06-7f1f106072c5
Request ID: 8a22214d-e30a-42da-92d0-09b32da3b965
Correlation ID: 01ad70ba-f2dc-fcfd-ea98-4de3bfaa2d13
Time: Tue Aug 05 2025 11:00:15 GMT+0100 (Irish Standard Time)
Service version: 13.0.26369.35
Client version: 2507.3.25169-train
Cluster URI: https://wabi-north-europe-c-primary-redirect.analysis.windows.net/

This puzzled me greatly as the dashboard looked completely fine on Desktop. After a few hours of hunting I was able to find that the issue was caused because I had renamed two measures in the visual which compared values with previous year figures.

I had changed them from their measure name to the same name, only in a slightly different case, in order to have uniformity in the matrix columns (while also allowing me to use  different conditional formatting on each): VAR % YOY and Var % YoY.

I can understand how this would throw things off - it is obviously bad practice to have two different fields with the same name; but given that they were effectively only column headers I was shocked, and let's face it relieved, that this was the source of the problem. 

Just wondering if anyone knows why this issue would only arise now, when the dashboard has been online for so long?

Thankfully not an urgent issue but I am intrigued to find out why!

[rohit1991 · Accepted solution]

Hi @nmanley03 

It’s interesting how Power BI Desktop and the Service behave differently here. The Desktop lets you get away with a lot, but the Service tends to be more strict especially after backend updates. Having two measures with nearly identical names (just different casing like VAR % YOY vs Var % YoY) can definitely cause problems behind the scenes, even if they’re just used as display names.

What likely happened is that a recent update to the Power BI Service made it stricter in how it handles field references or column headers, and that exposed the conflict. It’s not the first time these kinds of “suddenly broken” reports pop up after a service push.

Best way to avoid it in the future is to make sure your measure names are unique even visually and rely on formatting or field display name settings if you need them to look similar.