2016 1 20 Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI MOD3 11 g

[Microsoft] If you've got a Date field in your model, it's really easy to use that to build charts that allow you to look at your data over time. So you can see here I've just got a simple column chart showing my unit sales, the total unit sales. But in my fields here, I've got a Date field, and I'm going to use this on our axis. When I drag that in, you'll see that we automatically add the year, quarter, month, and day. We've automatically generated this from the Date field. So I can see that over the last ten or fifteen years how my data has changed. And you'll also notice that I can automatically start drilling down through the years, quarters, months, and days. You can see in the Field well that I've got those four levels already added. So, as I start clicking into these, I can drill into the quarters, into a specific quarter, to a specific month, and right down to the day level. Let's go back up to the years again. If I'm producing this report and I'm going to share it with other people— and maybe I don't want them to get down right to the day level. Maybe I only want them to be able to go to the quarter level. I can click this cross button, and it will delete it out of the Field well. Now when I start drilling, I can only get to the quarter level. I can't go any further. So it's a good way to just control what people have access to if they're just viewing your report. Let's add that back in again. The other thing that I can do here— you may find, particularly for things like line charts, you actually don't want to see just the year level. I'd actually like to see everything at a day level for this chart. By clicking this little drop down I can choose— don't use the Date Hierarchy. Just go and get the raw Date values. And now I can see the individual value, so I can see that variance from day to day much more clearly. Let's go back to a column chart, and I'm going to drag this Date field back in again. There's one other thing that I wanted to show you here, and that's that as I'm drilling through this, the default drill path is to focus on the particular data point value. Choose, but show me all of the quarters or months or things beneath that. If I wanted to expand all of these and show all of the months for this year that I'm looking at, I can click this button in the top left. And this drills everything that is currently visible down to the next level. So now looking at all of the months for—I think it's 2006 that I drilled in to. If you want to double check that, you can scroll down to your filters— yep, that was it, it was the 2006 year that I drilled in to. So you can see we automatically add years, quarters, months, and days when you use any date field from your model. And you can drill up and down and control the levels that people have access to when they're viewing your reports.