QUESTION :
I’m beginning my first PowerPivot, but I’m starting to think my setup is completely wrong, or maybe PowerPivot isn’t the right approach.
I have two tables: A huge table of wages per week for multiple sub departments, and a table that lists information for each department.
I added the tables to the data model, and immediately realized I didn’t know how to establish the relationship between the two since one column in the department table is related to all the columns except the date column in the Wages Table.
My end goal is to have data I can control with slicers that can show data that matches data in the Departments Table – show only Wages for Departments that are Overtime for department X, show data for all departments but only overtime, etc.
Is there an easy way to establish the relationship, or do I need to setup my data differently?
Sample Data is below if it helps.
Thanks in advance.
ANSWER :
For anyone else who finds this, I found the answer, I needed to unpivot my Wages data first. Long explanation is below for anyone new to this like me:
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I selected the Wages Tables, and under the Data Tab, I selected “From Table/Range” in the “Get & Transform Data” Group. This opened the PowerQuery Editor.
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From here, I needed to keep the date as a unique column, and combine all the wages. So after selecting the date column, I went to the Transform Tab, and opened the dropdown for “Unpivot Columns” in the “Any Column” Group.
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I chose “Unpivot Other Columns” from the dropdown.
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With the data in a useable format, I hit “Close and Load” in the Home tab.
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This opened a new sheet with my unpivoted data in a table. This can now be loaded into the Data model under the “PowerPivot” tab and the relationship can be established now.
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In my case, the new unpivoted data had a renamed column called “Attribute” which contained my Departments, and the other table also had a department column. Under the “Home” tab of PowerPivot, I opened the “diagram view” in the view group and linked the two department columns between the two table. The picture doesn’t show it very well, but the link is between the two highlighted columns.
- Now I can make a pivot table based on the Wages Tables, and filter it by data in the other table. For the sample above, I can now add a slicer for Wages that only shows overtime departments, or only sub department under Dept 1 but not Dept 2, or only department 2 overtime, etc.
