Back in 2018, when I wrote a detailed post on how to create nested display folders for measures in Power BI, I mentioned that unlike in Analysis Services it was not possible to make a Power BI measure appear in two or more folders simultaneously. The other day on Twitter Deepak Agrawal pointed out that at some point since I wrote that post the situation has changed, so here’s a quick post showing how it now works.
Say you have a simple Power BI dataset with a table, a column and a measure called My Measure:
If you go to the Model pane in Power BI Desktop and click on the measure so that the Properties pane appears, and then enter a list of folder names separated by semi-colons such as:
First Folder;Second Folder
…you’ll see that all the folders in your list are visible in the Fields pane (if they weren’t there already) and your measure appears inside each of the folders. There’s still only one measure – it has not been duplicated – it’s just that it appears in more than one folder. This can be very useful if you have lots of measures that need to be organised into folders in several different ways.
Bonus observation: I hadn’t noticed this before, but you can also drag and drop measures into different folders in the Fields pane. I suspect that’s been possible for ages but I never tried it before.
Does it applies to Azure Analysis Services too?
Hello Chris, this (both options) were very useful in my model. Thanks.
Nice one Chris! Suspect this will be of use in the near future.
Hello, Chris –
coming at you from the perspective of a SAS – not SSAS nor SaaS – kind of jack-of-all-trades, I was going through your posts since the beginning of this blog;
and wondered do you still think of AS Cubes as server-based and local #January_2005
Local cubes were old-fashioned even in 2005, and I haven’t recommended using them for a long, long time.
ok, Chris, thank you for returning my “call” and, listen, I’m not advocating/denying that old technology be reusable in the future. All I’m saying is: learn from the past, enjoy the present state of it and make PowerBI consistent across ai-enabled, KDD-dataMiners and whatever Python-R-Perl may bring. that pint [Guiness, of course for an Irishman 1/8 like myself] and a sushi on the deck looking out over the Potomac never appeared so enticing…
Excellent! Just checked and it works with SSAS 2019. We have an immediate use for display folders on dimensional attributes, which it works on also.