Are you drowning in data tables? Do you feel like you keep searching for your measures and it’s endless scrolling? In this post, you will learn how to organise measures in Power BI. Much like having your filing cabinet in a certain order, be it alphabetical or by theme. Or even how you have your files structured on your computer, it’s important to have your model, data structure, and table layout, organised, not only for you to locate or navigate your way around your data, but somewhere down the line, someone else might need to make sense of it.
Having too many tables and wide structures can be handled in many ways, but taking time to organise measures will help you in your report building process.
So, without further ado, here are the two options
Options to Organise measures
Option 1: Creating a measure table
This will be the central place where all your measures will be kept. It helps to organise measures and makes it easy to locate.
How to create a measures table?
First, you have to create a table to “house” them. Do this by going to the Home tab and choose Enter data.
Simply add a 1 value, you will later hide this column. Name it appropriately.
Awesome, your table is created! Now you can add your measures to that table as you would normally do. Right-click on the table and choose “New Measure”.
Last steps for this Option to help organise measures.
Hide Column 1. Right-click and Hide
It will then appear like this.
You’re probably thinking, how does this organise measures if you’ll just have to scroll down and have to find this table?
Relax, hide the Fields pane, and then unhide it again.
Look at that!!
Power BI picks up that this only contains measures and changed the icon to a calculator (the icon for measures) and this table will automatically always appear at the top of your list of tables.
Moving your existing measures to your new measures table
Don’t worry, you don’t have to redo them, you can simply move them from one location to another.
Click on the measure you want to move, then go to the Measure Tools tab, Home table, and click on the table you want to move it to.
All your measures are now all together, easy to find and organised.
Option 2: Measure folders
If you prefer to keep your measures within the table that they relate to, another option to organise measures is to create folders and placing them inside to keep them together.
You will need to go to your Model view of your report
Click on the measure you want to place in the folder. The Properties pane will appear.
That is it, so easy. Your measures nicely tucked away. This option can also be utilised with a sub-folder if your model is very large and further clarification is needed.
Extra tips to organise measures: Put some planning into naming your measures, this can be helpful not only for you to use the correct measure but for others that might have access to your report. This blog post makes a great case for naming conventions in Power BI, not just measures but tables and fields.
I originally wrote that you can name your measures whatever makes sense to you, and simply rename the visuals to what will be more understandable to the user, however after reading the above I too will be putting more thought to all my naming conventions. Read more about measures here.
I hope you found this helpful.
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