Power BI Blog: Display Names for Summarized Fields

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series.  This week, we look at improvements in the display names for summarized fields.

To improve comprehension for end users and new creators, the display name for summarised (summarized) fields has been updated recently to include the default or selected aggregation:

Previously, default aggregates would be dropped from the display name, and this applies to all aggregates not just the ‘sum’ aggregation.  This is in response to the fact that it has been noted that dropping the aggregate leads to users misinterpreting what aggregate is being applied, if any.

For example, in the table (below), the Sales and Unit Price columns do not indicate to users how they are being aggregated.  This may cause users to think both columns have a sum aggregation applied, which is not correct for the Unit Price column.

This improvement will be available on all new reports by default.  If you want to enable this behaviour for existing reports, you can navigate to File -> Options and settings -> Options -> Default summarization and enable the setting: For aggregated fields, always show the default summarization type.

Check back next week for more Power BI tips and tricks!