Power BI Blog: Power BI Report Builder – Part 2

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series. This week, we look at how to create reporting tables in the Power BI Report Builder.

Last week we looked at how to bring data into the Power BI Report Builder. This week, let’s create some report tables in our report.

To create a table, navigate to the Insert tab on the Ribbon, and we choose the ‘Table Wizard…’ option in the Table group:

This will prompt the ‘New Table or Matrix’ dialog to appear:

From here, we may either pick an existing dataset ‘Category_Sales’ or, if we do not have any datasets ready, we may always select the option to ‘Create a dataset’ then click Next. If we create a dataset the report builder will walk you through the steps outlined in the previous blog.

Clicking ‘Next’ will bring up the ‘New Table or Matrix’ dialog box. This box allows us to arrange the fields by dragging them from the ‘Available fields’ area into the appropriate areas like the ‘Row groups’ and ‘Values’. In this case, I have brought the EnglishProductCategoryName and the EnglishProductSubcategoryName fields into the ‘Row groups’ area and the Total_Sales field into the Values area.

After clicking ‘Next’, I will be prompted to fill out more options about our table. We will have various options of customising grand totals and sub totals, viz.

In this example I have elected to have blocked grand totals and display subtotals below the table. I have also ticked the ‘Expand/collapse groups’ option, but I will provide more on this option later. Clicking ‘Next’ will take us to preview window that will let us see what our table will look like with the current settings:

This doesn’t really provide great detail, so let’s move on to the report page by clicking on the Finish button.

We have created our table. However, it is currently still in preview mode. If we want to see what our table will look like with data in it, we will have to hit the Run option located on the Home tab of the Ribbon.

After clicking ‘Run’, I obtain a table:

Notice that each Product Category can be expanded and collapsed: this is because we ticked the ‘Expand/Collapse groups’ option.

That’s it for this week. Come back next week for more on the Power BI Report builder.

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here. If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.