RYAN MEGITIMA: Hello, Power BI community.
Welcome to the Power BI, April 2023 update.
My name is Ryan Majidimehr and I'm going to be walking you
through some of the exciting features
that we have for you for this month.
If you want to hear about all the other
features we release this month,
find more information on our demos,
technical documentation, that sort of thing.
You can find a link to the Power BI blog post
in the description of this video.
Well, let's get started.
First step is dynamic format strings for measures.
This new feature allows you to create
a format string that also uses a DAX expression,
giving you the flexibility to adjust
the format string to
a variety of contexts within a report.
I'm going to hand it over to Zoe,
who's going to be telling us a little bit more about
the new feature and demo a common scenario.
ZOE: Dynamic format
strings for measures
gives you a way to define
the format string used on that measure in
a conditional way or based on
data that's already in your model.
A common scenario that this comes
up in is if you're doing currency conversion.
Here I have a measure where I
am converting the sales amount into different currencies.
Now the problem is when I want
to see these same currencies,
they all show with the dollar sign instead
of the appropriate format string for that country.
Now I can actually add a dynamic format string to
this measure so that it will show them in
the appropriate currency format string.
If I come to the "Format" drop down,
I can go ahead and click this new option
"Dynamic" and when I do that,
a left dropdown will now appear,
which will can toggle
this measure
between the measure DAX expression on the format,
the dynamic format string expression here.
It will go ahead and auto-populate
whatever format string was
previously on this measure
but you're free to go ahead and change this.
This is a helper to to whatever
DAX expression that's going to
output the appropriate format string.
Here I'm going to go get the one from
my model and assess not available then I'm
going to give it back in any default way.
Now when I look at my visuals,
I can go ahead and change this and I can see they are now
displaying in the appropriate format string.
What's good about changing the format string
instead of using,
say, a format in the DAX,
is it preserves
their underlying datatype so they still remain
numeric and they're just
displaying correctly now in all the visuals.
Now to go back and see if I'm on this measure,
I want to go and edit the dynamic format string.
I can come in and use the "Format" dropdown.
If I want to remove
the dynamic format string from a measure,
I can use the "Format" drop down here and just
simply pick any other value that
I would like to use here.
As this, you cannot undo this action,
you'll get prompted and
the dynamic format string is removed.
If you're familiar with calculation groups,
these are the exact same dynamic format strings that are
used there in calculation items and you can find
out more information about that in
our documentation where aka.ms/calculation groups.
There is a section here on
dynamic format strings that can help you get started.
Also another point to note
is if you're visual is not showing
the correct Dynamic format string to make sure you also
check that in the value section of the axis,
the display units is not auto,
but instead set to none and that
will make sure that that dynamic format string
comes through without
any additional layer protein from the visual.
Here I'm going to go change this one to none,
and I can see it was all the decimal places
as well. Thank you.
RYAN MAJIDIMEHR: Thanks Zoe. Next up,
we're going to look at some updates to the
new On-object interaction.
If you recall from last month,
we released the preview of On-object interaction,
which allows you to right-click on a visual to
access to the format pane and make edits there.
Roseanne is going to demo some of the updates to
this feature that have come through community feedback.
ROSEANNE: To address feedback
from last month's release,
we've updated the behavior of the auto toggle.
Now when a user explicitly
changes the visual type from either the
top five or the full gallery we switch "Auto-load" off.
RYAN MAJIDIMEHR: Thanks Roseanne. Well, that
wraps up our feature highlights for this month.
Tell us in the comments,
what was your favorite feature?
Was there another feature for this month that
you think we should have spotlighted instead?
We also would love to hear what you think of
the new changes that we're making to these videos.
Like, comment, subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and we'll catch on the next one.