Problem with date hierarchies

One of the earlier posts referred to date hierarchies, a relatively new functionality that allows the month, quarter, or year to be automatically created based on a column containing a date (depending on the data that column contains). This can cause a problem with previous reports that contain dates, and the user wants to see them as originally created. How to solve this?

Date hierarchies

Recent versions of Power Pivot possess the feature that automatically generates hierarchies and columns that calculate year, quarter, and month for date columns. It is automatically activated when you drag such column into a Power Pivot report. This can be of use, but it can also bother you. In the following text you will find out how you can turn on or off this Excel feature.

Sunburst

Sunburst is another new chart brought to us with Excel 2016. It is suitable for displaying sales values (traffic, earnings, merchandise, etc.) according to periods, arranged by hierarchies such as: years, quarters, months, days … It reminiscent of a Doughnut Chart, because the width of the ring shows the value that we want to present. It differs in showing several rings, each corresponding to one of the hierarchies.

Hierarchy of reporting dimensions

When we use Power Pivot reports often happens that we’ll use two or more reporting dimensions, hierarchically arranged, to provide organized access to information. If something like this occurs frequently we can use specific functionality of Power Pivot reports: Hierarchy. Hierarchy is a named set of hierarchically arranged reporting dimensions, and more about ways for creating and using them you’ll find out if you read this recipe.