List of Column names in dropdown list

[Hannan]

Hi All,

I am new to Power BI (3 hours only).
Need your help to find out if there is a way to display list of column names in the drop down for PowerBI.

Need to create a cascading filter.

Regards,

Hannan Mahmood

[MFelix]

Hi @Hannan,

Welcome to the community, without understanding your requirements it's difficult to help you, take into account that PBI is a Bussiness Inteligence tool and the way of working is different from an Excel Spreadsheet or other tools.

What is the purpose that you want to achieve with this "dropdown list"?

Regards,

MFelix 

[Hannan]

Hi @MFelix,

Consider following data.

A	B	C	D
A1	B1	C1	D1
A2	B2	C2	D2
A3	B3	C3	D3

I first want a dropdown with all the names of the columns (i.e. A,B,C,D)
Then based in the column selected in this dropdown I want another list filter to select the values in this.

For Example: If Dropdown is selected as 'B'.

I want list to display (B1,B2,B3).

if Dropdown is selected as 'A'.

I want the list to display (A1,A2,A3).

I have been using other tools (like Cognos, Spotfire, Tableau, QlikView etc.), I want to know if this is possible or not in PowerBI.

Regards,

Hannan Mahmood

[MFelix · Accepted solution]

Hi @Hannan,

This is possible however since PBI uses tabular models you need to change the way your information is setup, so you need to unpivot your data and then add both columns result from that into two slicers.

Check the example below and the attach PBIX file:

Query Editor unpivot:

Slicers with dropdown:

I know that probably you will be thinking that this will cause that your data will need to have calculations based on the columns A, B, C ,D however as I said the structures of the information and of the data is similar to a database so you have to have a different approach to your data.

Regards,

MFelix

[Hannan]

Hi @MFelix,

Got it.

This means i'll have to import same data twice as using unpivot will render the data useless for reporting. I can use the unpivoted data for filters and base reports on main table.

Regards,
Hannan Mahmood

[MFelix]

Hi @Hannan,

You don't need to import your data twice. As mentioned PBI is not like reporting in other tools and things can be reshaped and using the tools inside PBI you get the expect results.

Adding to this if yoy reimport this table just for filtering your data that will not work because you need to ha e relation between the tables and columns relates with columns and not with lines, so it will mot work as expeced.

Regards,
MFelix