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A quiet month, after the frenetic activity of the July update, sees lots of small changes to matrices, tables and charts, but no single big update.
- Updates to Power BI Desktop for August 2017
- Parameters for What-If Analysis
- Live Connection to Power BI Service Data Sources
- Multiple Values for a Matrix can now Appear as Row Headers
- Conditional Formatting of Font Colour
- Customising Matrix Subtotals (this blog)
- More Improvement to Line Charts
- New Scatter Chart Insights
For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop since November 2016 see this blog, or have a look at the Power BI courses that we run.
Posted by Andy Brown on 14 August 2017
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Customising Matrix Subtotals
This small change lets you position and display subtotals more exactly, but to reproduce it you first have to have a matrix containing them.
OUr online and classroom Power BI courses will teach you many more tips and tricks like this, and without you having to Google first!
Creating an Example Matrix
Suppose you create a matrix like this, which displays total sales by environment and family for a company selling toys:

Although there are two row titles, only one will display by default.
To display the second row title, click on the symbol shown below:

Click as shown to show both row titles together.
The resulting matrix shows subtotals by default:

You can now see subtotals!
Changing the Display of Subtotals
Now we've got some subtotals, you can change how they display:

You can choose to display subtotals at the bottom of each section (the default) or the top.
Subtotals at the top show up alongside the row title:

You can see the total sales for each environment next to the name.
You can also choose for which fields to display subtotals:

Set the Per row level property to choose for which fields to display subtotals (here for both the EnvironmentName and the FamilyName fields). For a matrix with only two row or two column fields, you won't see much difference.
You can do a similar thing to column subtotals - the only difference is that the property above is called Per column level, not Per row level.
- Updates to Power BI Desktop for August 2017
- Parameters for What-If Analysis
- Live Connection to Power BI Service Data Sources
- Multiple Values for a Matrix can now Appear as Row Headers
- Conditional Formatting of Font Colour
- Customising Matrix Subtotals (this blog)
- More Improvement to Line Charts
- New Scatter Chart Insights