It’s Hot Tip time here on How To Use Power BI, and for this tip, we’re going to learn about Display Folders, a little hidden feature in the Model View of Power BI Desktop. They are going to be your new best friend if you have to build reports with lots of data columns or you need to make a lot of DAX measures.

Keeping everything organized so you can find them is a pain without some kind of system, right?

We’re going to use a Power BI report that already has some data connected so you can see how to find the Display Folders option. If you want your own copy of this Power BI file to do this on your computer, here you go:

If you’d also like the source data this file is connected to (and then you can connect your Power BI Desktop to it so everything is on your end), you can download it by clicking here.

If you need a primer on connecting to an Excel file, here you go.

Video:

Written:

We have a Power BI report with some data already connected (the file and the data are above the video above) and we’re going to look at the Model View of our report.

Click the 3rd icon on the far left of your canvas to access the Model View.

Here we see the one table of data we’ve connected. It’s data about the 77 Communities in the City of Chicago. It has the area of each community in square miles and square kilometers, plus the population of each community in 2017, and then the population density of each community.

It also has the Community’s Name and Number (they all have a number from 1-77) plus an empty column called Column 8.

This is quick and easy dataset to show how Display Folders work. You’ll use Display Folders on a larger dataset where you have lots of columns and lots of DAX measures.

So when you have a ton of columns and measures, it can be hard to find the right one when you’re looking in your Data Pane for it when building a visual.

What Display Folders do is give you a way of putting columns that are similar, or of a certain type, into… you guessed it… folders!

Let’s try it. Let’s say we want our Population field and our two Population Density fields all in a Population Folder, since they’re all about population. That way when we need a field about population in our visual, we know exactly where it is.

First, click on the “Population 2017” field in the box on our Model View. When you do this, a lot of Properties about that field show up on the Properties Pane to the right of the canvas.

These properties let you set a lot of things up for a field, but today we’re only interested in the “Display folder” box.

Let’s enter “Population” as our new folder name, hit Enter, and you’ll immediately see a new “Population” folder with that Population 2017 field inside it show up in your Data Pane!

Now, you could do that same process for the Population Density fields, but now that the folder is created, you can drag and drop them into that existing folder right IN the Data Pane:

Then, when you’ve done that, you’ll have a folder with all 3 fields in it!

You can collapse it too, getting those fields out of the way when you don’t need to see them!

This is SO useful. It’s like putting data fields away into drawers, all safe and sound until you need them. I use them a lot for datasets with a lot of date fields. I can stick them all into a folder and then when I need a date field I don’t have to go hunting around in a large dataset for it… I know exactly where it is.

Take care everyone,

Joe.