Dates and Modeling Revenue over Time

[purpletiger]

Hello! I am new to Power BI and could really use some help. I am working on modeling revenue based upon the contract start and duration, which I have done sucessfully creating a new column for each month in the Data view versus Power Query. Now that I have the revenue each month with the column header being a date such as "1/15/2018". How do I get the model to recognize the column header as a date? Can I get the column to have both an attribute and a date i.e. Budget 3/31/2018? 

Do I need to do the modeling in the Query Editor (aka Power Query?). 

Thank you!

[v-xjiin-msft]

Hi @purpletiger,

As I know, we cannot change the data type of column header. The column header is just a column name of one column. And the data model can only recognize the data type of the values in this column. If the values are date type then the entire column is date.

Then in your scenario, what did you mean that you want to make the model recognize the column header as a date? And for the second question, did you mean that you want to merge columns? Like:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/merge-columns-power-query-80ec9e1e-1eb6-4048-b500-d5d42d9f0...

Please share us some screenshots about your data model and expected result. It'll help us understand your requirement more clearly.

Thanks,
Xi Jin.

[purpletiger]

I figured it out, I simply needed to unpivot the table and then model a date column.