Hide, resize and reorder columns in Power BI matrix

Inforiver delivers a powerful 'Manage Columns' feature that helps you show/hide columns, reorder measures, resize columns by setting default column widths and apply custom aggregations in your Power BI table / matrix reports.

To access this feature, click on the 'Manage Columns' dropdown from the top of the ribbon menu.

Using the check boxes on the right, you can choose to show/hide measures from your report. You may want to hide one or more columns under several circumstances:

• When you want to temporarily turn off some measures (e.g., related to costs) to focus on one or two measures (e.g., sales and profitability), or
• you have assigned some fields from your data model solely for the purpose of using them in calculations - and you do not want to display them, or
• you have broken down a large formula into a series of interim calculations (i.e. measures), and you do not want to display all of them;

In the above image, the icon preceding each measure name shows how that specific measure is displayed. E.g. 2021 Actuals is shown as a bar chart. This is very helpful to figure out where the columns are relatively positioned in the table.

The search feature at the top of this window helps you to find any measures from the list.

Advanced settings

Finally, when you press the gear icon from on the top right, you will see a more detailed window as shown below.

In the Display tab, you can

• override the default aggregation for each measure at the visual level,
• set default widths for each measure, and
• click on the gripper icon in the far right and drag it up or down to change the column order.

Note that when you override default aggregation, Inforiver will use only the data presented to the visual.

In the Versions tab, you can set/update the versions and perform variance analysis.  

Note that, by default, if the data fields are assigned to the AC, PY and PL fields during data mapping, it gets automatically updated.  

Auto-adjust column width in the matrix

Finally, there are a couple of additional ways by which you can quickly adjust column width, especially when you have a lot of columns in the report. This can be done directly from the toolbar in three ways: 

1. Choosing ‘Fit to Content’ or ‘Fit to Header’ resize the columns to respectively fit its contents or column header   

2. ‘Best Fit’ auto-adjusts both rows and columns that optimizes real estate 

3. Manual Column Width allows you to enter width for specific columns in pixels 

Related Power BI Ideas:  Hide/Show Column on Table 

Curious about Inforiver? Read why Matt Allington (Self Service BI Expert + Microsoft MVP) , Excelerator BI prefers Inforiver over the Analyze in Excel capability that comes with Power BI for ad-hoc analysis.