Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Summary tables are a great way to convey key indicators and underlying data points.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files. You can download the source data files for the course from the resources section of your Lessons page.
Tables.pbix460.4 KB Tables - Completed.pbix
458.4 KB
Quick reference
Tables
Working with Table visuals in Power BI
When to use
Table visuals are useful when you want to show tabular data, and don’t want to see it aggregated in any way
Instructions
Creating Table Visuals
- Select the Table visual
- Drag the fields you want to display into the Values area of the visual
- Note that Text fields can be used in the Values area
Formatting
- Dragging multiple fields into the Values area will render side by side columns of data
- Visual formatting can be done via the fields under the paint roller in the Visualizations area
Hints & tips
- Format your measures (on the Modeling tab) as you’d like them to show in your Table. While the Table won’t let you declare a specific number format, most other visuals will.
- Start your formatting by choosing the closest Matrix style to what you want, then further customize via the other options.
- The Condensed Matrix Style takes up the least room on the visualization canvas.
- Tables cannot show subtotals. If you need a subtotal, change your visual to be a Matrix instead.
- 00:04 In this video, we're going to look at the Table,
- 00:07 which is a very close cousin to the Matrix.
- 00:10 We start by going and
- 00:11 clicking on the Table icon which is right beside the Matrix.
- 00:14 You'll notice the Table is the one that doesn't have the shaded bottom and
- 00:17 right areas.
- 00:19 And when I do that, I'll get a table.
- 00:21 Now, as they're so close, I just wanna show you what happens if we use
- 00:25 the same structure generally as what we actually have on the Matrix.
- 00:29 So I'm gonna start by saying, let's go pick up Locations and
- 00:32 we'll put location name on it.
- 00:33 And you'll notice it gives us a list of the unique locations
- 00:37 as we had with our Matrix.
- 00:39 I'm then gonna go to Categories.
- 00:41 And this is where you're going to see a very big difference, because when I click
- 00:44 on Category, what you'll notice is that the category names all show up and
- 00:49 the location names expand and fill down for it.
- 00:51 That did not happen with the Matrix.
- 00:53 In the Matrix, you'll notice that the category names are indented underneath
- 00:57 the heading of each of the locations, so this looks a little bit different.
- 01:01 I could then of course also go and grab our Sales,
- 01:05 we could throw that on, that gives us our nice little sales values there, and
- 01:09 I could go to my budgets table and throw on budgets.
- 01:12 And you'll see that it shows up very similar.
- 01:16 And yet it's not actually collapsed and indented like the Matrix is.
- 01:21 How similar are these visuals?
- 01:22 They're very similar.
- 01:23 Check this out.
- 01:24 If we select the Matrix, and we go to Home, and
- 01:28 Format Painter, and we click on our Table, you'll notice that it actually picks up
- 01:33 some of the same features that we have, like the headers and what not.
- 01:35 Now, it doesn't pick up the data bars or anything like that, but
- 01:39 you'll notice that there's definitely some similarities between these two things,
- 01:42 although it didn't pick up the same style.
- 01:44 Can we actually play around with that as well?
- 01:47 Absolutely.
- 01:48 Notice that there's a matrix style for the table visual.
- 01:51 And if we click on that,
- 01:53 we can change it out to use the same style as the matrix we're using condensed.
- 01:59 Now, you'll notice that when we do this though it tosses the yellow formatting
- 02:03 that we had for our header, so that's a little bit of a shame.
- 02:06 If we wanted to reapply that we now need to go and do a little bit of work there.
- 02:09 So Column headers, our font color which we use the black, and
- 02:14 the background color was in yellow.
- 02:17 Now we can have the same kind of style and
- 02:19 header there that we had with the other setup that we had.
- 02:23 We can also change things like Word wrap.
- 02:25 If we've got an issue where words are wrapping in the headers,
- 02:28 that can be changed.
- 02:30 Let's take a look at Values,
- 02:31 do we have any more granular control over our numbers in this particular case?
- 02:34 If we scroll this down, it's not really looking like it.
- 02:37 We can change the font, but that's about it, and the text size.
- 02:40 So that's a little bit disappointing.
- 02:43 What about Totals?
- 02:45 We have our totals.
- 02:46 Nice. We can change the background color here,
- 02:48 so we can get into this yellow framework that we're using,
- 02:50 if we want to, to make that consistent top and bottom.
- 02:53 Of course, we can do the same with the Matrix, as well.
- 02:57 Let's see, what else might be of interest to us, and when we actually go through and
- 03:00 look at this.
- 03:01 Column formatting.
- 03:02 What do we actually have in here?
- 03:05 Again, you would hope if we close this guy here and
- 03:09 open up the visualizations pane a little more, you would hope that,
- 03:12 again, we would have the ability by column to go and
- 03:15 actually set what are our values in our number formats and whatnot.
- 03:19 But again it doesn't look like you give the stats, so
- 03:21 we're stuck with whatever we define as the base measure which is really unfortunate.
- 03:25 Conditional formatting options.
- 03:28 Again, we can apply data bars, so those can look pretty sharp.
- 03:31 This is done on a column by column basis.
- 03:33 So let's go take a look at Budget and
- 03:35 see if we could do something different with this.
- 03:37 How about color scales?
- 03:38 There we go. We can see which
- 03:40 ones have the highest budget items.
- 03:42 Or we can even go into Advanced Controls and you can see that we can play we have
- 03:46 a very small amount of options here with the conditional formatting, but
- 03:51 this is an area I believe that we will be investing in as well.
- 03:54 So hopefully we will see more things come in there.
- 03:56 So Table are very similar to a Matrix, but definitely have some differences.
- 04:01 The biggest one really is around the layering.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.