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Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

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Brett on 20 Feb 2020 03:14:54

AAS recently implemented Calculation Groups with big fanfare.

However any SSAS / AAS Cube that has *any* users using Power BI in Live Connect mode cannot add this feature to their cube. I would be willing to bet this is > 95% of all Microsofts Cube customers.

The problem is that any graphical visual (i.e. not table/matrix/card) will not honour *any* format string (static or dynamic).

This means that any simple measure that shows a % will show as a decimal 0.01 instead of 1%.

This is such a jarring issue for users it means that we cannot use the great new feature because Power BI has only allowed Matrix and Table to honour the Format String as defined in the model

I've contacted the support team and I'm told that the dev team are only expected to start working on this during this summer with no ETA.

A real shame that Microsoft's flagship reporting tool cannot work with Microsoft's flagship OLAP database until then. Our users were looking forward to reducing the number of measures to 0.2 of what they were (sorry, that should be 20%, couldn't resist :) )

Administrator on 06 Dec 2021 18:29:56

This has been fixed.

Comments (22)
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George Vepkhvadze on 16 Aug 2023 03:51:31

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

Still the issue

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CRISTOBAL DE JESUS SALCEDO BELTRAN on 03 Sep 2022 18:24:09

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

Hello everyone, this problem has not been solved yet? I have the same problem...

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Eric Pfau on 03 Aug 2022 20:09:51

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

This is still an issue as of 2022-08-03 and should not be marked as completed.

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Ryan Reynolds on 13 May 2022 21:08:12

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

This bug is not fixed and continues to make Calculation Groups unusable. It's been over 2 years...

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Jaap Olsthoorn on 10 Jan 2022 14:12:00

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

Marked as completed but defo not working. Add a format string to a calculation group item and watch all your gauges and bar charts lose their percentages. I created an issue here:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Some-visuals-gauge-bar-disregard-measure-format-strings-when-our/m-p/2275297#M825730

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Marco Russo on 16 Dec 2021 21:23:27

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

This idea has been marked as completed, but this is inaccurate.
1) Custom visuals still do not support custom format strings - as far as I know, the Custom Visuals API do not provide the required information, so this cannot be supported by custom visuals.
2) No all of the native visuals support custom format strings: Ribbon chart (only partially working), Funnel, and Gauge still do not support custom format strings (I didn't test a few of the latest ones, the list of incompatible native visuals might be incomplete).

Clearly, the biggest issue is with the custom visuals.
Please, update the state of the idea to correctly reflect the incomplete status of this implementation.
Thanks.

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Darwin Dat on 18 Nov 2021 14:40:45

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

May I know when it would be fixed? I (and for sure many other people) have been waiting for the fix for nearly 2 years!

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Дмитрий Шестернин on 09 Nov 2021 12:11:50

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

Update status pls. The problem is still reproducible

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Helge Schroeder on 21 Oct 2021 13:38:58

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

Still no news? I encounter this issue still, using Azure Analysis Services (1500-model).

Its the same story. You introduce a calculationgroup and test it a bit using tables/matrices. You are happy, and deploy it to test, only to discover that all you percantage-measures now show as decimal numbers in bar charts.

Same solution as pointed out: Leave all "Format string expressions" empty ensures that format strings are maintained.

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Patrick McMonagle on 25 Mar 2021 18:31:55

RE: Format Strings don't work on a SSAS Model with Calculation Group(s)

Any further update on this?

This issue has just tripped me up on smart narrative visual (arguably not GA yet), but text based measures no longer show because the addition of calculation groups have caused the all text measure to be of type variant.