Recently I was working as part of an instructor team delivering PowerBI. One of the topic covered was parameters. Basically what this allows you to do is create a range of values (or other options) so you can assess the effects of various changes. This tutorial would be aimed at people doing this for the first time.
This idea is that you create your measures (formulas in PowerBI) . Then set up a parameter with your range of numbers you want to use. Then adjust the measure to include this parameter. then you can use the list of values to assess the outcomes.
I used an AI generated file with sales and Region data to create this.
Here is the completed PowerBI file
I began by loading the file into PowerBI Desktop
- Open a blank report
- Get Data from Excel workbook
- and I loaded the two tables from the file
I checked the relationship between the two in the model view – you need to have a relationship between the two tables for measures that pull from multiple tables to work. You can read about relationships here.
Next step was I created a measure to get the total of the sales – Total Sales
Then I created a chart to reflect this. And added a slicer for the 4 regions.
I then created another measure that multiplied the Total Sales measure by .05 (This .05 is really just a place holder that I will replace with the parameter later on). I called this Sales Change
From the Modelling ribbon I then created a parameter that had a range of -.05 to .5. I called this parameter Sales Change Parameter
This creates a parameter slicer and a Parameter table
I then amended the Sales Increase measure by replacing the .05 with the Sales Change value.
Then experimented with the parameter – you can see the values change.
I do see this as having a lot of possibilities. Let me know how you get on.