Have you ever been faced with the issue where Power BI automatically adds a sigma symbol to the front of your column if it detects it’s a data type of integer or decimal?
Now this isn’t too much of an issue if you’ve imported only a few columns but what if you’ve imported lots? Going through this column by column can become tiresome!
Luckily there is a hack, not only to turn summarization to “None” on multiple columns at once, but also to quickly change the formatting too.
As an example, I have imported a table from Excel into Power BI with 27 columns (“Column A” through to “Column Z”) and a “Key” column. Power BI detected that all of my columns contain whole numbers (or integers) and applied a summarization of “sum” against each column automatically.
So how do we quickly change this? Click the “Model” tab on the left hand side. Open the table up to expose all the columns within a table you want to change multiple columns within. Next select the inital column you want to change and then either select a range of fields using Shift+Click or select multipile fields using Control+Click.
Once you’ve selected the group of columns you want to change find the advanced drop down in the properties window and change the “Summarize by” option to “None”.
That’s it! There are other formatting properties in here too so feel free to have a play and change multiple columns at once!
Very simple and to the point explanation. Keep it up.
Genuinely useful guide, hidden feature but really easy once you know. Thanks for documenting this!