July's Power BI update sees error bars become generally available & the introduction of a new DAX function, NETWORKDAYS!
Error bars now generally available
With this release, the error bars feature is now generally available! The Power BI team have also added various new capabilities this month to round out the feature. First, you’ll notice a new option to enable data labels for your error bars! Now, just as with data labels on your values, you can get the actual values of the upper and lower bounds directly on the visual.
Error labels can be enabled from their own card in the formatting pane, where their font & colour can be customised - just as you can with other data labels. There is also an option to colour the error labels with the colour of their associated data series.
There have been more type options for error bars added this month. Now, instead of creating error bars based on upper and lower bound options, error bars can also base upper and lower bounds on percentage, percentile, and standard deviation. Choosing Percentage will show upper and lower bounds as calculated from the displayed value of your value field, and choosing Percentile or Standard deviation will display bounds calculated from the aggregated data points at each X-axis value on the chart.
Lastly, there is a new “make symmetrical” option for “by field” error bars. Choose just one relative measure for calculating error bars, and the "make symmetrical" option will mirror that field in both directions. In cases where upper and lower bounds are the same, this will require one less field to create error bars.
New DAX function: NETWORKDAYS
The Power BI team have added a new DAX function this month: NETWORKDAYS. This function returns the number of whole working days between two days & can be used with any way of expressing a date in Power BI to specify the start and end dates, including the dt”YYYY-MM-DD” notation.
Working days exclude weekends, which are customisable using the optional weekends parameter. By default, this function will use Saturday and Sunday as the weekend days. Any dates provided in an optional holidays parameter will also be excluded when calculating working days.
For example, the following will return a result of 20 working days:
WorkingDays := NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2022, 10, 1), dt"2022-10-30")
For reference, October 1st, 2022 is a Saturday, and October 30th, 2022 is a Sunday.
The following returns 21 working days, because it specifies the weekend to be Friday and Saturday:
WorkingDaysFriSat := NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2022, 10, 1), dt"2022-10-30", 7)
Finally, the following returns a result of 19 working days, because it specifies two working days in the timespan as holidays:
WorkingDaysFriSatHolidays :=
VAR _holidays = {DATE(2022, 10, 3), DATE(2022, 10, 4)}
RETURN NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2022, 10, 1), dt"2022-10-30", 7, _holidays)
This can be a great way for calculating days worked for things such as productivity calculations, etc.
More information about the NETWORKDAYS function can be found in Power BI's documentation, here.
For the rest of the Power BI July 2022 update, click here, or if you would like to discuss Power BI for your business, email info@pt20.com.au or give us a call on +61 746 596 700.
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