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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

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Automated Data Dictionary

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Cian O'Sullivan's profile image

Cian O'Sullivan on 02 Dec 2020 14:34:45

There needs to be a more intuitive way for report creators to automate the creation of data dictionaries they can include in a report. For example they should be able to pick & choose key metrics and columns that will appear in a data dictionary visual, that shows the DAX for the measure as well as the ability for the creator to put in an explanation of the business logic. At the moment the creator must copy and paste the various formulas into a sharepoint list or similar to pull this in in order to make reports understandable to end users who dont have edit access.

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Jefferson Bauer on 31 Aug 2023 22:24:09

RE: Automated Data Dictionary

I would love to see the ability to expose the schema tables that hold the field description, synonyms, formulas, etc... inside of a Power BI dataset. This information could be used to automate the data dictionary. We are doing this in a manual fashion. We run DAX Query to export the TMSchema tables out to excel and then import them back into the dataset. We hide the tables in the model but create a report so users can filter/search fields and see what the descriptions we store in the dataset are. It would be great if we could just simply update the description of the fields in the dataset and then be able to easily report on the field descriptions.select * from$system.TMSCHEMA_TABLESselect * from$SYSTEM.TMSCHEMA_COLUMNSselect * from$system.TMSCHEMA_MEASURES