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Change column labels/names in the visual

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Mario Nelaj on 14 Feb 2017 04:45:43

It would be great if we could change columns labels/names in the standard visuals (Table & Matrixes mainly). In our company we have a data warehouse build to support the PowerBI tabular model with the data. The field names in the data model are not the most intuitive to our PowerBI End User. It could be great if we could change the way the field labels are shown in our tables to be more intuitive and meaningful without needing to change the field names in the data model.

Administrator on 06 Jul 2017 13:05:17

With today's release, you can now rename any field within a chart or table! Learn more in our blog post: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/blog/power-bi-desktop-july-feature-summary-2/#rename

Comments (149)
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Phillip on 05 Jul 2020 22:41:00

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

It seems like the developers focus more on Power BI reports that are not connected to SSAS. The current paradigm is fine for small reports since you just rename in the model, but for larger and shared external models, you really need to be able to change the display name in the visualization, anywhere on the canvas.

The lack of this capability makes it difficult to sell Power BI to large enterprises who have huge investments in SSAS already.

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Greg Booth on 05 Jul 2020 22:40:17

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

Essential for us to fully adopt PowerBI as our reporting tool.

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:39:56

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

Please keep me updated if Power BI will have this feature in the future, in the meantime I'll keep using SSRS

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 22:39:48

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

Any update on this request? This feature is very important when there is a direct connect to SSAS/tabular. Long concatenated names that are from the model should have been easily renamed.

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Chad Jones on 05 Jul 2020 22:38:46

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

I agree with the idea. I have field names in the actual data table that are meaningful to me but not the easiest for my audience to understand. For instance, I have a calculated measure called msrEncountersPerDay. I would like to be able to adjust the property of the column header to be "Encounters Per Day" so that the report is cleaner for my audience.

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Chad Jones on 05 Jul 2020 22:38:46

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

If this cannot be done within the matrix properties then maybe it could be done using the synonyms section of the tool.

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John on 05 Jul 2020 22:38:42

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

This is a must have. Customers have different terminology for the same data element, across geographies (e.g. US verses Europe) and even across organizations (e.g. Controlling verses Treasury). The ability to alias column headers separately from the underlying data structure preserves references. Making column header aliases dynamic (an extension of the basic alias feature!) would allow localization of reports to specific individuals, organizations or geographies, e.g. foreign language support!

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Mario Nelaj on 05 Jul 2020 22:38:36

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

This is one of the reasons are PowerBI reports have not been as widely accepted as we hopped. Its extremely important to be able to change table or matrix header.

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Tyler Burgess on 05 Jul 2020 22:38:31

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

Any updates on this request? My thoughts are that within a visual's fields pane, the end user would have the ability to right click on a measure within the fields pane, and an option to change the display name would be available.

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David English on 05 Jul 2020 22:37:47

RE: Change column labels/names in the visual

This really is an essential feature. Not having it makes either database admin a headache, or the Power View reports redundant.

I'm still using Excel Pivot charts as a result, which is frustrating as hell while all these great PV reports are sitting there gathering dust.