Finally Something Worked This Week

Originally, this post was going to be a long one because of something I couldn’t do in Power BI, so I spent a couple of days writing a long and complicated post. But then, during the week I found that there was a simple way; it was just hidden to me.

So, this post will be about 2 things I learned, and at the time, was not very obvious to me.

One is horizontal slicers versus vertical slicers. I learned about the horizontal slicer at a meetup and it looks way cooler than the vertical.

I’m attaching the PowerPoint that I developed for work on how to create these horizontal slicers. Page 5 of the PowerPoint shows the “List” option in the slicer visual that may be invisible to most.

(Now the visuals in the PowerPoint are fuzzy but maybe you can get the gist of it.)

The other thing that I learned concerns Table visuals and how one can adjust the column width. There is a field in our database that would just list a bunch of characteristics of a product in one line, something like Figure 1. It would be okay if there were only a few characteristics but if there were a lot, that could impact the layout of the visual on the page, like the yellow highlighted item in Figure 2. That field could run into another visual.

At first, I thought I had to divide up the table into two columns which would entail some complicated DAX formulas, but then in the middle of the week, I accidentally found where I could adjust the column of the Table visual. It’s kind of invisible.

Figure 3 shows the Table visuals outlined by the handles that typically appears when you choose a visual. I was trying to adjust the column by using these handles. Instead you have to find the invisible edge of the column as shown in figure 4 (the red arrow) and use that to adjust the column. Figure 5 shows the end result after adjusting the invisible column.

Now, I did create a column and used DAX to clean up the Table by replacing the “;” with a kind of bullet and adding spacing. Compare the old layout with the new layout to see what I mean.

The DAX formula used was:

AA1 = SUBSTITUTE(‘VFFCombined Table – Prop Info'[Apartment Amenities],”;”,” “&UNICHAR(149)&” “)

The UNICHAR(149) is what gives the bulleted dot in the middle. You can rename that “AA1” into something more meaningful; I just left that there to signify in this post that a new column was created. You could probably do a DAX formula on the original column – I’m not sure how – but I wanted to keep the original column as is in case I needed to use it in the future.

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So, Power BI may be hiding some features that won’t appear your cursor hovers around that invisible area. That’s what I’ve learned so far in using the tool. You are just going to have to do a lot of Googling.