Power BI Update April 2023
By Luke Sisley, Senior Business Intelligence Analyst, CSL
Dynamic format strings for measures
This month, The Power BI team bestow us with an exciting new Easter gift that will allow users to alter formatting of strings based on conditions. With this new function, measures can be formatted using a DAX expression, granting users the flexibility to adjust formatting to a variety of contexts within your outputs.
Dynamic format strings are added to a measure by clicking the data pane and selecting Dynamic in the measure tools ribbon format dropdown. Changing this drop-down from Dynamic will remove the dynamic string format.
This will bring in a new dropdown next to the formula bar, where you can enter a DAX expression to format your string.
You can return to your measure by selecting Measure in the dropdown next to the formula bar:
DAX functions – RANK and ROWNUMBER
I am not playing an April Fools trick when I say that the two new DAX functions, RANK and ROWNUMBER, will make your life easier when dealing with rankings. These functions will return a number indicating the rank for the current context within the specified partition, sorted by the specified order. The difference between RANK and ROWNUMBER is that ROWNUMBER will return an error if there is a tie, while RANK will assign the same rank multiple times.
These functions rely on the ORDERBY and PARTITIONBY functions. ROWNUMBER will try to avoid returning an error by finding the least number of additional columns required to uniquely identify every row and append them to the ORDERBY clause.
You can learn more about these new functions by accessing the DAX documentation: RANK, ROWNUMBER
Hierarchies are now supported in the Power BI Mobile app
April may be known for showers, but the addition of hierarchies in the Power BI mobile application is sure to brighten the day for some users. Building on the level of interactivity in the Power BI mobile application, this update makes it easier for you to view your metrics and scorecards at different levels of your data. Users can select hierarchies by clicking the hierarchies button in the scorecard footer.
To Wrap Up The Power BI Update April 2023
Thank you for reading our short summary, and remember that you can access the full list of updated features here.
For support in getting the most out of Power BI, please call us on 01483 528302 or email info@csl-uk.com, or read more about how our Power BI experts can support you here.
