Power BI Beginner Level: 18 - Table and Matrix Visuals

Table of Contents?|?Sample Input?| Power BI Report File

Short summary: The Table visual allows you to display columns of your data in a table format, even from multiple related source tables. The Matrix visual is the equivalent of an Excel PivotTable. It is a summarization table with the summarization sliced into the categories which you can place on the rows and columns.

Let us now look into the Power BI visuals in detail. You have already seen the Table visual in action in previous articles. Start off by inserting a Table visual and drag and drop the columns you need.

You may have noticed that Power BI automatically changed the Date column into a date hierarchy of multiple columns for Year, Quarter, Month, and Day. This feature is called Auto date/time. If you'd like to just only the date, click the Date column and select Date (instead of Date Hierarchy).

You may have also noticed that number columns are summed up by default ("Sum of"). We want to show all rows without summarization, so click on each number column and select Don't summarize.

Note that when you define table relationships (see a later articles), you can also mix columns from different related tables, which can be quite powerful.

If you want to do summarizations, I recommend you to use the Matrix visual instead of a Table visual. A Matrix visual is Power BI's equivalent of a PivotTable from Excel, which I described in an earlier article. However, I will explain it again in detail here because understanding well will help you with most other visuals.

Imagine that you get to summarize an input table with just a single value. Think about what you want to summarize (which column) and how to summarize (sum, average, ..). In the example of our sample data, let's say we are interested in the total sum of profit.

Insert a Matrix visual and move the column Product profit onto Values. You get the single value Sum of Profit, which is 840€.

So far so good. With the summarization handled, i.e. what is summarized and how, let’s further slice the result by Sales representative. Move the Sales representative onto the Columns.

You get the summarization over Sales representative as well as the grand total, which is still 840€. Note that the column items, in this case the sales representatives, are pivoted into the horizontal. Hence why this visual is called PivotTable in Excel.

Let's slice data data even further by moving Product name onto the rows. I also change the formatting of the profit column to currency in the Data view.

And there you have your complete Matrix visual. Most Power BI visual work in just the same way as the Matrix visual. Just remember to start with what column to summarize and how (sum, average). The rest will be easy, and you can move columns around until you have your desired result.

Next up, let's look at the Filter pane to further filter our data.

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Next article:?Filter Pane and Slicers