From the course: Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate (PL-300) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

Configure table and column properties - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate (PL-300) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

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Configure table and column properties

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- [Instructor] Okay, so in this sub lesson, we're going to configure table and column properties. So when taking a look at your data model, we want to evaluate the table properties and the column properties. The fewer tables and columns we have within our data model will make a generally easier model to use and navigate for our end users. And on top of that, good naming conventions will help prevent misinterpretation and or misuse of the data. Keeping in mind that we're developing our models for self-service use in general, and the better naming conventions and fewer tables and columns, the less intimidating the model is to your end users. And organizing your data into appropriate structures will make it easier to find the data. And the ultimate goal here is a drag and drop end user self-service experience. So let's go to the Power BI desktop now and take a look at some of the table and column properties. All right, so I am in the Power BI desktop, and I'm back over in the model view. And right now I'm taking a look at my starter schema here. And in particular, I'm going to take a look at the product table and the properties that are available to set at the table level. So with the product table highlighted as the green or aqua ring around the outside here, I can go to the properties pane, go to general and see here is where I can name my table. I can go through and put a description of that table and what it contains in here as well. I can add synonyms in for this table, keeping in mind that you get a one physical name for your table and we'll see columns as well, but we can add additional synonyms on top of that to help expand and enhance the QA function in your organization. We can go through and set a role label and a key call, which is some features that can be used over inside of Excel. We're not going to talk about those here. We can actually hide the product table from the data model if we want, and I can go ahead and set this to be a feature table. So for example, I'm just going to go ahead and hide this table away from the data model. Give it one sec. We can see everything here in the tables hidden. If I go back over to my report view, we'll actually see that that table is no longer visible in the data view itself. So if I go back over here and make it so it's visible again here, which is what we want, go back over here to the report view, we'll see that the product table is now available over here in the data model for reporting. All right, so those are some of the properties in the general tab. Let's take a look at the advanced. Nothing we can do here at the moment because this is drawing data from an Excel spreadsheet. We can see right now the storage mode is set to import, and there is no ability to go ahead and change that. Right, so next up, let's take a look at the individual columns. So I'm going to go ahead and look at the product key column, and first we'll take a look at the general tab. Once again, we can go in and give the column a name, and keeping in mind, each column can only have one physical name. We can put a description in and then have a comma separated list of synonyms for this particular column. We can enter a display folder. So if we want to organize our columns into display folders, we can go ahead and do that. We can set the column to be hidden or not. That's what I'm going to leave back on. So there's some of the properties in the general card. The formatting, we can choose the data type and the format. So just take a look at some of these here. Over in the advanced, we can go ahead and set our sort by column, which we'll talk about later on. We can assign a data category and determine if there is a way that we want to default summarize our column in our data model. All right, so there you have it. There's a number of the properties we can take a look at at the table and columnal perspective. And with that, we're at the end of the sub lesson.

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