Unique Ask For Drill-Through: Can it be turned off?

While holding a training on Power BI a few weeks ago, I was explaining the differences between a drill through page and drill-down capabilities on a visual. Both are great tools to take advantage of when building your reports. Drill down is wonderful when you want your end-user to see the details of your data on a smaller scale. Think of seeing your data on the country level, then the state level, then the city level, zip code, okay you get the point :) Now, a drill-through page on the other hand will take you to a brand new page where any visual you place on that page will be filtered based on a specific field from a visual on your current page.

So what unique question/request did I get....?

While explaining how a drill-through works, I was asked, "can a drill-through be turned off?" For clarification, I explained "Do you mean if a drill-through was set up by the "state" field and you had multiple visuals with the "state" field could you turn the drill-through off for certain visuals?" They said "EXACTLY."

I had never had that request before, so I immediately went to the formatting pane for the visual itself. There was no toggle on/off switch for drill-through pages though. I still was not quite sure why they wanted to have drill through on for some visuals AND off for others, but that wasn't the point. I had to think of a way to accomplish this.

The solution was quite easy, but my mind was on a one-track loop thinking it could NOT be done since there was no formatting option for the visual to turn it on or off. I had to walk away from the problem for a few minutes, and then it finally dawned on me. To accomplish what they were asking for I would need to duplicate the drill-through column in question in the Power Query editor.

This duplicated column could be used in the visual where drill through capability was NOT wanted to be available. We could then use the original column for visuals that they did want to have the capability.

Now, if I add the new duplicated column to the map visual there should not be the drill-through capability, since the drill through page was set up with the original "State" field.

Comments

The Power of CALCULATE in Power BI

Last week in my blog and video I discussed how Power BI could have made my life as a teacher much easier. It is not that Power BI can do things that I could not on my own. It is the fact that Power BI could have saved me so much time. This led me to some thoughts and questions. How could I have impacted the students more in the classroom with this extra time? Would teachers who were not analyzing student data due to time constraints now start? How can I make the data tell my students a story that gives them an accurate picture of their progress? That last question is what leads to this week’s blog. Many times the metrics (which is just a fancy word for "numbers") of what we want to show are easy to do by hand with a basic math background. Although easy, it can be very time consuming when dealing with different groups of data: like 6 periods of students instead of 1 period. When we want to do these calculations quickl...

Relating "Related Tables" to Baseball because I Miss Sports

I miss sports. In particular, I miss baseball. Between learning more Power BI functions and the ins-and-outs of DAX, I've turned to Netflix to fill the deep caverns left in my soul since baseball season has been postponed. And as a result, I've thought more about tigers and big cats more than I ever have in my life. I know ALL about Carol Baskins and am fully on board for a spin-off centering on locating her lost husband. I've googled "is it really legal to own a tiger in a residential area?" Without baseball in April, I am barely hanging in there (kinda like Joe Exotic's eyebrow ring). So, I am filling the sports-sized hole by using baseball stats in Power BI to demonstrate pulling data from multiple tables and consolidating it into one table. Some of the data we want to consolidate also has to have some aggregations (which is fancy for "calculations") performed on it. In this demo I will attempt to break down what is really going on ...

The Teacher Becomes the Student

My wife asked how my first day was going so I sent her this selfie. Only a picture could capture it. First, let me tell you that this won’t be your typical Power BI or tech blog that you usually see. Let me set the scene. It was a year and a half ago when I got lucky enough to be introduced to Brian Knight, the CEO of Pragmatic Works over lunch. He had heard from a mutual friend that I was looking to make a career move after teaching Algebra for the past 15 years. Brian started telling me about the company and all the different facets it encompasses. From training, sales, consulting, and app development. Mind you at this time I had never heard of Microsoft Power BI, SQL Server, Microsoft Azure, or have any experience with coding. He told me an opportunity at his company may present itself in the future where I could transfer over my teaching skills into the training side of the above-mentioned programs. I immediately got to work with their On-Demand Learning system to ...

The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

Search This Blog