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New features in the November 2018 update of Power BI Desktop

Part two of an eight-part series of blogs

A big new update this month, including expandable row headings in matrices, copying and pasting between visuals and conditional formatting of charts (although it's what's waiting in preview which will really blow your mind).

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog, or have a look at the Power BI courses that we run.

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 November 2018

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Expandable row headers in matrices

Power BI now lets you expand row headers, just like for an Excel pivot table:

You can click on the + symbols to expand a row's contents.

Two surprises for me with this feature: it doesn't work for column headers, and the + symbols aren't enabled by default (presumably for compatibility reasons).

When row headers are available

In order to be able to expand row headers you have to have more than one field. Here's an example of a suitable matrix's field well:

With this matrix you'll be able to expand regions to see their towns, and towns to see their shopping centres. However, you won't be able to do a similar thing for column headers.

Expanding/collapsing using the right mouse button

Microsoft are gradually coming to rely on the right mouse button a bit more in Power BI, and it's the best way to expand/collapse rows:

If you right-click on a row you can expand (or, where appropriate, collapse) by Selection, Entire level or All. See below for what the different options mean.

Here's what the first two options above would show:


Selection	Entire level

Choosing All would expand not just all of the regions, but also all of their towns to show their shopping centres.

Enabling the plus and minus buttons

If you want a more graphical way to expand or collapse, enable the + / - buttons:

You can click on the +/- icons property at the bottom of the Row headers formatting section to enable the icons, then control their size and colour (this example is shown below).

Here's what the example above would show:

Yuk! The default icon size and colour was much better ...

More on how expanding and collapsing rows works

Here are some more notes on how this new feature works:

Area	Notes
Preserving state	If you save and close a Power BI report file, Power BI will remember your expand / collapse settings and restore them when you re-open the report file.
Conditional formatting	Any conditional formatting will apply only to the lowest-level of detail shown in a matrix.
Legacy software	This feature doesn't work with SSAS tabular models before version 2016, or with SSAS multi-dimensional models.

To illustrate the second point, here's what we'd see for our example if we applied a rule to colour cells where the total quantity was over 50:

Only the cells at shopping centre level are coloured (which is probably how you would want this to work).

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