The Model View and column tools

Now you’ve watched the screen capture on managing relationships in the Model View, let’s take a deeper dive into what else the Model View is capable of…

The Model View: Capabilities

The Model View is not just used to work with relationships. You can use it to show different aspects of the structure and properties of your data model, from tables right down to individual columns.

The Model View: An example

In Figure 1 below, the the 2019 Customers table has a unique (primary key) CustomerID column related to the 2019 Orders table, which also has a CustomerID column.

The two tables have a One to Many (1:*) relationship. The arrow in the middle of the line shows the direction of the filter flow – a single arrow indicates one direction filter. (A double-headed indicator would mean the cross-filter is in both directions.)

A screenshot of the One to Many relationships between two tables in the Power BI model view.

Figure 1: One to many relationships between two tables in the model view

Editing: Tables

When you select a table in the Model View, the property panel displays useful information that you can edit.

The primary options you can edit are:

Name – Create an alias or user-friendly name
Description – Comment or annotate the table
Synonyms – Provide alternate names for the user to search
Is hidden – This allows you to hide the table in the report view

Figure 2: Properties pane filled in

Editing: Columns

Moving down a layer and selecting a column, the task pane shows important properties about the column. At this level, you will find options that you can edit to provide more useful information for the front-end report.

The primary options you can edit are:

Name – Create an alias or user-friendly name
Description – Comment or annotate the field
Synonyms – Provide alternate names for the user to search
Display folder – Create collections of fields for ease of search
Is hidden – This allows you to hide the field in the report view

We know that when you are preparing the data, setting the data type is crucial. You can use the Properties pane to customise the formatting and data types for the field in the same way you can use the Query Editor to change the data type.

A screenshot from the Power BI software showing the properties pane and its list of text entry fields and buttons. These include: 'Name', 'Description', 'Synonyms', 'Display folder', 'Is hidden (yes or no)', 'Formatting'. 'Data type' and 'Format'.

Figure 3: Properties pane not filled in

What’s next?

With our knowledge on the Model View enhanced, let’s move on to look at how to format data in the most suitable way for using the column tools we’ve heard about here.

The Model View and column tools

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