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Wanted: Filtering Power BI Data Views

Rob Collie is rabble-rousing and building up a pitchfork mob:

I don’t know how we’ve managed to go this long without the ability to Filter in the Data View:

As simple as it sounds, this is the #1 thing I miss when I leave the Excel Power Pivot environment for Power BI Desktop.

Why do I miss it?  Debugging and Validating, primarily.  When I’m getting results from a measure that I don’t trust, it is super common for me to filter a table in Power Pivot so that I’m just looking at a specific set of rows.  And then I often filter by a second column, and then sometimes a third, in order to see if there are any unexpected surprises in the data.  Scrolling through thousands of rows looking with my eyes just doesn’t cut it.

This is positively crucial, at least for me, and creating a Table or Matrix visualization to perform the same task is such a high-friction alternative that I’m usually tempted to start over in Power Pivot.  Ugh.

In fact this is the overwhelming #1 reason why, if I’m starting a model from scratch, I try to do as much of the work as I can in Power Pivot before converting over to PBIX format.

Rob has provided a link to the Power BI Ideas forum, making it easy to vote this item up.