Text in stacked bar when no data - how?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a stacked bar displaying some measures.

Is it possible to display a message like "This has not been assessed" or "There is no data" in place of the bar where a condition is met?

I can see no way to place custom text into the chart, how would I do this?

Using a custom visual chart generator is way beyond my capabilities at the moment to achieve this.

[ToddChitt]

Power BI only shows you data that is actuall THERE, and can't show things that are NOT there. I don't think it has the ability to show test of "Missing data for this column" or similar.

Suppose you sell Widgets in variants of A, B, C, and D. You create a Column Chart showing Sales by Variant and you have four columns, one for each of the Variants. 

But then for one particular time slice, you didn't sell any widgets of Variant C. Your Column chart will now have only THREE columns, not four. 

The only way to get around that is to have a DIMENSION that lists all the Widget Variants, and relate this back to the Sales table. Then set up a MEASURE = IF ( ISBLANK ( SUM(Sales) ), 0 SUM(Sales) ). 

That way, at least the variant with no data will show up with 0.

I know, now what you want, but better than nothing.

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

Thanks for the follow up 🙂

I guess I can make a bar that is the full length of the max value and then make it black or something instead.

I need the blank one to be there as the users wanted to know it had been reviewed and there was just no data present. Its part of some audits.

Is there any way to do custom data labels in the standard visuals so I could change the text value? Or would I need a custom visual to do anything like that?

Cheers

[ToddChitt · Accepted solution]

Honestly speaking, a bar of ZERO LENGTH next to bars of data pretty much sums it up. Why would you explicitly need to state: "There is no data for this member"?

Oh, let me guess, because 'that's the way they have seen it in the old system so they expect the same here.' How close am I?

If that's the case, then I will give you my honest suggestion, if you can: Cut your losses on this, go with what you can get, and try to wow the users with other features to make them forget about this extrememly minor shortcoming. Stuff like native support for mobile platforms, usage reports on the service, maybe even a Key Influencers grapph. Basically, convince the users that even though they can't see it THAT way doesn't make it a bad product. 

Best of luck