Dynamic Bandings in Power BI Desktop

Recently I’ve been looking at applying dynamic bandings for a client. What was required was to split the data into different bandings upon the values in the source data. For example – if it was product price, the bottom third would have a low value, the middle third would show as being in the middle and the top third would show it was a high value.

The client was using the latest version of Power BI Desktop which supports several new functions. In order to achieve this I used one of the new percentile functions (PERCENTILE.EXC) which made the process really simple, so I thought I would share the technique.

Firstly I imported the dataset – in this example I have a used a basic dataset. Test Value is a number which increments from 1 – 300 over 300 rows.

image

Secondly I added a calculated column ‘Banding’ for which I used the following DAX formula:

1 Banding = 
2 IF ( 
3 VALUE ( PERCENTILE.EXC ( SampleData[TestValue], 1 / 3 ) ) 
4 > Table1[TestValue], 
5 "Low", 
6 IF ( 
7 VALUE ( PERCENTILE.EXC (SampleData[TestValue], 2 / 3 ) ) 
8 > Table1[TestValue], 
9 "Medium", 
10 "High" 
11 ) 
12 )

Uploading the workbook to Power BI you can now see that we have 100 rows belonging to each of the different categories based upon the dynamic banding we have applied using the percentile based calculation.

image

We can now use this to determine how products of different colours perform – for example we can see that compared to blue products that there are more red ones in the High category. We can also break down sales of product colour by banding.

image

The only issue is that we can’t sort in the order Low > Medium > High as Power BI is arranging the values alphabetically. In order to do this we need to add a column to use for sorting. This can be achieved using the following DAX formula:

1 BandingSortOrder = 
2 IF ( 
3 VALUE ( PERCENTILE.EXC ( SampleData[TestValue], 1 / 3 ) ) 
4 > Table1[TestValue], 
5 "1", 
6 IF ( 
7 VALUE ( PERCENTILE.EXC ( SampleData[TestValue], 2 / 3 ) ) 
8 > Table1[TestValue], 
9 "2", 
10 "3" 
11 ) 
12 )

In the model designer select the Banding calculated column and on the ‘Modeling’ option tab click ‘Sort By Column’ and select BandingSortOrder.

image

Hide the BandingSortOrder column from the Report View so it’s not visible in the reporting layer (right click in fields to do this).

image

Now when we publish to Power BI we can see it’s now ordered from Low to high:

image