Details in Matrix visual

Although Power Pivot reports still have advantages over the Matrix visual, in charge of displaying a table with a high level of detail, Microsoft persuades us day after day that Power BI will be able to carry this field as well as its “older brother”. The following text discusses the drill-down techniques used in Matrix visual and how to apply them to the selected detail, and are available since November 2018.

To begin with, let’s create a Matrix report. In Rows we have added a simple hierarchy that consists of the dimension MANUFACTURER, BRAND AND ITEM NAME; In Values ​​we added measures to calculate sums of sold quantities and amounts. The report was further formatted by highlighting alternated rows, and we also added gray color its background and turned on the border.

If you pay attention, there are drill-down shortcuts in the upper right corner of the report, and this analysis technique was mentioned in one of the previous posts. It is possible to perform a drill-down analysis, drill-up, expand next level or all levels of the report. However, it was not possible to expand an individual branch of the report, at least until the appearance of the November update.

The news is that by right-clicking a mouse over a branch, for example by selecting CARLSBERG SERBIA, the context menu that shows the Expand submenu opens. It contains options: Selection, which expand only the selected branch, Entire Level that refers to the entire level of dimensions, and All that displays all dimensions.

In the case of choosing the first option, only an additional level of detail for the chosen branch, i.e. the CARLSBERG SERBIA item, will be displayed.

Although this option is quite handy, users are accustomed to standard Expand and Collapse buttons, represented by icons marked with “+” and “-“. To display these buttons one should got to formatting menu, then to Row Headers submenu and there select the appropriate option. It is also possible to adjust the color and size of Expand/Collapse buttons. By enabling this feature Matrix visual will remind more of the pivot table and enable expanding or collapsing report details.