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.
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.
It’s a loooong title (well, it was «Conditional Formatting with divergent color gradient for values and totals»), but it’s exactly what I wanted to achieve when I discovered the limitations of the conditional formatting options in the GUI of Power BI Desktop. The key words are «dynamic» in one hand and «values and totals in the other» I know, some of you may think I’ll be doing some copy-cat article of the crazy video from Bas in which he shows how to use the undocumented (that I know of) function hsla(). A function that you need to leave as text?!? Crazy, just crazy. But no, I take a complete different approach and I think it’s worth the effort! Of course you can take ideas from both me and Bas and come up with your own unique approach for dynamic conditional formatting.
Ok, this is a rather niche use case, but I’ll go ahead anyway, basically because I think it’s cool.
In conditional formatting in Power BI you have three options: By values, by rules and by measure. In this last case, you have to provide a measure which provides a hexadecimal code, such as #FFFFFF for white and so on. When I saw this option I liked it because you can write the most twisted logic of the world and format according to that, but I felt uneasy about the fact that you have to hardcode the hexadecimal codes in the DAX logic. WHAT IF YOU DECIDE TO CHANGE THE THEME OF YOUR REPORT??