Power BI
Needs Votes"New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
Helge Schroeder on 24 Feb 2021 12:50:22
With the preview feature "New field list" enabled, we no longer have the ability to show hidden fields when building reports in Power BI desktop. This is usefull for reportbuilders to access fields which should be hidden from end users, but are useful for report building (filters etc), or to debug by showing and using key fields.
I hope to see this option come back once the "New field list" goes to GA!
- Comments (10)
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
Good information, thanks
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
hi team, this change is going to be ruinuous for our enterprise with 20 or so PBI models.
Here's a few ways that we use hidden fields:
1. Following best practices we hide all the foreign keys and all the surrogate key so they are clean. During development, when we are developing reports we still have to unhide them for debugging/understanding the model. This is particularly important in an enterprise scenario where people building the reports are not the same as those building the model
2. We centralise all measures into one Measure table. We get this Measure table to "float" to the top by hiding all the columns. But the measure table has hidden columns with metadata about each measure - its name and DAX definitions and format string and description. So that when a report developer is trying to view the the definition for a DAX measure they can unhide this table and drag it to the screen.
3. Similar to 2, we plan to embed glossary/dictionary/metadata to each model that are hidden as they are not strictly part of the model.
4. Our models have default hidden calculation groups that do useful things. For example, measures sometimes come up with (blank) when there's no data. Instead of making two measures for every measure, we make a calculation group that would turn any blank to zero and apply them at a visual level to places that needs it. This calculation group is hidden because it is not part of the semantics of the data. We have other calculation groups in this vein.
5. We have tables that we want to "soft launch" into production for users to preview/test. We can keep these as hidden tables. Advance users can start using these tables without confusing them with truly production-quality tables. If users cant see hidden tables, then we lose this ability to let folks "try" something.
I was hoping that PBI service would give users an option to View hidden just like the desktop does. But it seems PBI desktop is going backward with PBI service.
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
This is such an important feature for our team. All our models are depending on it.
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
As a report builder this would be a huge loss to lose this functionality!
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
This is a vital feature that should not have been removed.
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
This has me concerned, I'm a business analyst and have a very broad stakeholder group, even at the report developer level. We have databases and analytical models that cross multiple business units. Is my team supposed to expose the entire model to everyone, including components that are not relevant to that business unit? Stakeholders with a low skill level are going to see massive and complex models, and in a worst case scenario information that is classified as not appropriate for their business unit.
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
Power BI team, please let us know if this inability to unhide hidden fields is intended or unintended. It's not mentioned as a 'feature' in the documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/transform-model/desktop-field-list)
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
Removing this ability would cause us a problem as we hide ID columns by default but the report developer need to be able to see them during their report development!
Please bring it back!
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
This is so crucial to our workflows, can't think why they removed it!
RE: "New field list" in preview, has no ability to show hidden fields in report view
This would mean a mayor problem for us, since many tables we use for some reports are too complex for most of the users.
We need an option to make visible or invisible the tables, depending on the level of expertise of the user.