Ok, this is one of those things that I might not do in production unless I have the CEO shouting on my ear «I want the bars of the matrix to be smaller so I can read the numbers, and no, you may not use a custom visual for that!». I know that might be quite a narrow use case, but hey, if the CEO wants it, so be it.
Calculation Groups biggest contribution is to help us reduce the number of measures that we have to create and manage. However, sometimes, me might want measures again… Of course we can forgo the calc group altogether, but we might want to keep the centralized logic while having actual measures, and not measures + a filter as we usually do with calculation groups. The most relevant use case that comes to mind is when we do not want our calculation items to travel to the tooltip or drill through pages, as I discussed in this post not long ago. I guess that for most use cases, creating the measures manually is not the end of the world, but hey, scripting is fun and is cool, so let’s automate that a bit.
I’m always keep an eye open for potential new members of the Barcelona Power BI User Group. When I see a potential candidate I try to connect and get to know him/her. Today I was surprised that one of these unsuspected new members told me he was already using my script for Time Intelligence (yay!) and followed with a question on calc groups (double yay!). He was trying to build a KPI card which used a measure as the main KPI and wanted to use the previous year value as target, and was struggling to apply the calculation group just to the target one. I gave it some thought and I think the final set up might be useful to more people, so here I come.
Hello there, this is not an entirely new technique, but then again, maybe the use case will be useful to someone, so I’ll go ahead and put it here. Indeed the idea came once again from the whatsapp group of Power BI User Group Barcelona, great people all around. Paul shared with the rest of us a solution he brought to a question in the Power BI Community Forum. I that thread (and answering the particular use case) a few solutions involved doing it all in Power Query, while Paul brought in a DAX approach to the solution. Beyond the particular use case of the question, this raises the question: how can we show individual measures in a tabular format? Continue Reading..
Hello there, quite a while ago I wrote a blog post explaining how to override calculation items in tooltip. Basically, if I’m using calc item A and B in a chart, how can I use A B C and D in the tooltip. My solution was to add 2 extra calculation groups with lower precedence, one to remove filters from the calculation group on the main visual, an the other one (copy of the original calculation group) to recreate the desired calculations. This solution does work, but is quite tedious to maintain if you have changes in the original calc group, and (I’m not sure if it’s related) when combined with the time intel dynamic label calc group, it took A LOT to display the tooltip. I tested again a few days ago and even with my new laptop (i7 32GB of ram) it took like 10s, most of them going to «other» things, not the dax query, so little can be done.
First of all I have to credit Dan Meissner for bringing up the use case in the SML forum. The idea is to add the measure description in the tooltip, somehow. He thought that calc groups might be part of the solution, as they are «aware» of the measures in the filter context and tagged me as he knows my little obsession with calc groups. And indeed Calc groups can be the answer, but not in the way that I first imagined.
Hello, hello. After another round of presentations that dried my spare time to blog, just today a new use case came to me through a question in the whatsapp group of the Power BI User Group Barcelona. The goal was to be able to select the measures that should be displayed simultaneously on the same chart. The key here is the plural thing. Otherwise just use the famous script to create a dynamic measure calc group from Johnny Winter and off you go. But here the need is to select the measures from a simple slicer. I want to se measure A, B and D but not C.
Hello there, today I don’t have any new fancy use case for calculation groups or anything else, but rather a repository of links to the best of the best c# scripts… to create calculation groups. The main use of this post is to point people this way when I do a presentation on calculation groups, for example. Since they are «one-click» means you can just store it as Macro/Quick Action and even put it in a custom toolbar if you are using Tabular Editor 3 (which you should!). I’ll just start with two, but I plan adding more over time.
Once again I’ll recreate here a use case I found at work because I think it’s cool and with some gotcha’s that can be fixed.
The use case itself is broad enough. We are measuring the duration of an event (working hours, machine runs, etc) and we want to visualize it. Since we want to compare things, we need to graph a number, however, as humans, we might like to see 4h 30min instead of 270 min. Searching around in google you will find several approaches for transforming a number of minutes or seconds into higher units of time. And that’s a great starting point. For example here’s a great post by Reza Rad. Here we’ll just imagine we have minutes and we want hours and minutes.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite a few weeks if not months, and looks like today I may start finally to do it. The detonator has been that I had to do it at work, and Yuki asked about it on twitter. Too much of a coincidence to let it go.
Conditional formatting when calc groups are involved is a bit more challenging, but as usual with calc groups, once you grasp how they work you can do almost anything you want with it.