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CahabaData
Memorable Member
Memorable Member

Date Table: If/When needed

I see alot of Q/A in the community where the requirement includes a Date Tabl that I don't think one is needed and this has me confused.  So I would like to state what I think is accurate and hope that this will be either confirmed or corrected.

 

Scenario 1: Your core table(s) have a date field that you will want to do aggregate summaries by Week/Month/Qtr/Year.

- For this no date table needs to be explicitly created nor imported because Power BI does that for you in the background.  This is per video tutorial: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiHpkN0gfPM"

 

Scenarial 2: Your core table(s) have a Start Date and End Date (.... or something equivalent) that bracket a range of dates. Your tables do NOT have every date between the bracketed (Start and End) range as they do not exist within any core table AND you need reporting by those in-between dates.  In this case you would need to create a date table that has every date that will span the first and last dates of your core table date range.

 

Correct?

 

www.CahabaData.com
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
v-shex-msft
Community Support
Community Support

Hi CahabaData,

 

Based on you description, you want to know whenever you need to use a date table, right?

 

If as I said,  you can refer to below scenarios which you need to use date table:

 

1. many to many relationship.

If you have two tables both contain many duplicate date records and you want to create relationship between them, you should add a date table to link them.

 

2. Get specify date between start date and end date.

Sample: get the weekend from 2010 to 2015.

 

3. Use a slicer to filter multiple tables(contain date field).

 

>> the hidden automatic Date table and it automatically joins to all tables/fields that have a date field type...

You have a misunderstanding of the hidden table, the hide table is created by time intelligence feature, the hide table(date hierarchy) is analysis by date field, it only related to the column which used to create the table, not automatically joins to all tables/fields that have a date field type.

 

In addition, you could work through ‘Scenario 1’ without create a date table , the time intelligence feature is enable on the newest version of power bi desktop(2.38.4491.282).

 

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

 

Community Support Team _ Xiaoxin
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