My 3 Best Practice Tips For Organizing Power BI Models

Today I’m going to run through my best practice tips for organizing your Power BI models.  Trust me when I tell you that placing some good organization rules into your models is going to help you immensely as you start developing more advanced techniques inside of Power BI.  If I was to give you one simple recommendation when starting out, it would be to adjust your setup, as it’s where I see the most confusion on anyone’s journey of learning Power BI. 

First I start with how to intuitively setup your data model.  It’s amazing how messy your data model can get when you bring in multiple tables.  You can have tables scattered everywhere with relationships going off in many directions like spaghetti.  You want to avoid this at all costs.  The easiest way to have absolutely no idea what’s going on with your results or why your visual are producing weird results is to have a data model that makes no sense at all.  I run through some seriously simple ways that you can clean this up for yourself. 

Secondly, measure tables … I’m a big fan.  You could very quickly have 20-50 measures in your models, so you need to catalogue these well or you’ll spend your life searching for them throughout your tables.  You’ve also got to keep in mind that other people may want to use your models and build them out, so making it easy for them to find what they are looking for is key. 

Lastly, you’ll find that sometimes in the report section of your models you can have many columns in tables showing up in the fields section that you will never use in visualizations.  Well guess what – you can hide them away.  I do this all the time, and I make sure that only the columns I will use inside of visualizations remain.  You’ll be amazed at how clean your fields will look if you do this. 

Hopefully you like these best practices.  I go over these and more inside my online course Power BI Super Users Workshop.  If you are just at the beginning stages of your journey in learning Power BI, this is a good place to start. 

Any thoughts, certainly leave me a comment and let’s get the discussion going.