Power Platform Quick Tips - Fixing Power BI Column Sorting

Welcome to my new series called Power Platform Quick Tips! I’m excited to share tips to help you become better and more efficient in the Microsoft Power Platform – Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), and Power Virtual Agents - all in under 5 minutes.

In this first episode I’ll show you how to ensure your columns in your Power BI sort properly in any visual you choose. Let’s take a look:

• In my example, I have a chart visual that is displaying our cost by month name. But I notice that the chart is sorting by month name alphabetically rather than chronologically.
• This is also happening in my slicer; this is a commonly asked question, how do I change the sort order of my slicer?
• You can sort a slicer by ascending or descending order by clicking on the ellipsis at the top corner. But I’m going to show you a way to sort by a specific sort order for your visual as well as your slicer.
• To do this, I’ll go into the Fields pane and select the column in which I want to change the sort order; in my case it’s the Month Name column.
• I want to sort the month name by the month number which I have in my secondary field.
• Once I select the Month Name column, I go up to the Column Tools from the top tool ribbon and there’s a section called Sort by Column.
• When I select Sort by Column, I can specify which column I want to sort my month name by. As I want to display the month name but sort by month number, I select Month in the drop down.
• Then once I select the Month property, I can see that my chart and my slicer are now re-sorted and display the data correctly.

It’s that simple. You have two columns; one is the value you want to display and the second is the value you want to sort by. Use the Sort by Column under Column Tools to choose what column you want to sort the other one by.

If you want a custom sort order, you need another field to manage that sort order. That field can be one you create on your own or it could be one you pull in from your data source. One common scenario for this is if you’re looking at general ledger data and you want see accounts sorted in a certain order. You would want that sort order stored in a property or field in your data model.

That’s my Power Platform tip for this time in Power BI. This series will give you tips across the entire Power Platform. Keep an eye out for my next episode and reach out if there’s something within Power Platform that you’d like me to share a tip on.

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