New features in the February 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
Part seven of a nine-part series of blogs

You can now search for formatting properties, have slicers which work across pages and create quick measures, among other new features.

  1. Power BI Desktop - February 2018 update new features
  2. Search for a formatting property
  3. Quick Measures
  4. Synchronising slicers across report pages
  5. Multi-select data points in a chart
  6. Overflow data labels
  7. Marking date tables as such (this blog)
  8. Extra DAX functions
  9. Features still in preview as of February 2018

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog.  Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 February 2018

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Marking date tables as such

You can now explicitly tell Power BI Desktop to use a calendar table that you've imported as a date table.  To do this, first import a table containing a date key:

Calendar table

Here the date key field is - conveniently - called DateKey.  No two rows can have the same value for the date key, and each date appears once and once only.

With this table selected, choose the following option on the extreme right of the Modelling tab of the Power BI Desktop ribbon:

Mark as date table

Choose to mark this as a date table!

Choose the column in your table which gives the unique date for each row:

Date key column

Choose the column which contains a different date for each row of your table.

If - like Wise Owl - you always import your own data table, rather than using the built-in ones that Power BI Desktop supplies, you'll wonder what you've gained by the extra step shown above!

  1. Power BI Desktop - February 2018 update new features
  2. Search for a formatting property
  3. Quick Measures
  4. Synchronising slicers across report pages
  5. Multi-select data points in a chart
  6. Overflow data labels
  7. Marking date tables as such (this blog)
  8. Extra DAX functions
  9. Features still in preview as of February 2018
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