Categories: Power BI

Conditional Formatting and Quick Calcs in Power BI Desktop

There’s a new update out of Power BI Desktop (May 2016), but at the time of writing there’s no official announcement yet.
However, two great new features have been spotted by Chris Webb:

I installed the new PBI Desktop and tried those out. On an imported data set, you can click an arrow next to a measure, giving you the options to either define conditional formatting or to redefine the measure as a quick calc.

On the Total Units measured, I tried to format it that if the value is bigger than 1,000,000, a color was to be shown. However currently the conditional formatting works as a gradient. This means you can specify a lower limit Everything below this limit will get the color of this limit. The closest I could get was giving the lower limit the color white. In that case, the values above 1,000,000 are colored but they get different shades:

As you can see in the screenshot, I also defined the following quick calc on the Total Sales measure:

To do this, you have to add the measure twice, just like in an Excel Pivot Table.

It seems the quick calcs are supported in most visualizations:

The conditional formatting is currently only supported in a tabel visualization. Futhermore, it seems Analysis Services Multidimensional doesn’t support quick calcs, so it’s possible not all sources are currently supported. More info will come soon I guess.


------------------------------------------------
Do you like this blog post? You can thank me by buying me a beer 🙂
Koen Verbeeck

Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at AE, helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.

View Comments

Recent Posts

Book Review – Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices

I was asked to do a review of the book Microsoft Power BI Performance Best…

3 days ago

Create a Numbers Table in Power Query

This is a quick blog post, mainly so I have the code available if I…

1 week ago

Microsoft finally adds Tenant Switcher for Fabric / Power BI

Praise whatever deity you believe in, because it's finally here, a tenant switcher for Microsoft…

1 week ago

Book Review – Humanizing Data Strategy by Tiankai Feng

This book was making its rounds on social media, and the concept seems interesting enough…

1 week ago

Free webinar – Tackling the Gaps and Islands Problem with T-SQL Window Functions

I'm hosting a free webinar at MSSQLTips.com at the 19th of December 2024, 6PM UTC.…

3 weeks ago

dataMinds Connect 2024 – Session Materials

The slides and scripts for my session "Tackling the Gaps & Islands Problem with T-SQL…

1 month ago