Set Table Behaviour in PowerPivot

You can set the default table behaviour, which Power View uses to automatically create report labels for the table.

This becomes useful when you create visualizations from the same table, perhaps for many different reports.

Open the Excel Workbook we created in our earlier post. Create a Power View report

We use default table behaviour in the next few steps, so let’s set it now.

Open Medals Table in Data Model, select Advanced > Reporting Properties > Table Behaviour. A window appears where you can specify table behaviour.

• In the Table Behavior window, the Row Identifier is the column that contains only unique keys and no blank values. This is often the table’s primary key, but not compulsory to be any other field which satisfy this property. You have to select a Row Identifier before making other selections in the window. Select MedalKey as the Row Identifier.


• In the Keep Unique Rows section, select AthleteID.

Fields you select here have row values that should be unique, and should not be aggregated when creating Pivot Tables or Power View reports.
Note: If you have trouble with reports that don’t aggregate how you want them, make sure that the field you want to aggregate is not selected in the Keep Unique Rows fields.

• For Default Label, select a key that should be used as a default report label. Select Sport.


• For Default Image, leave the selection as [No Column Selected], since you haven’t added images yet. The Table Behavior window looks like the following screen.

• On the Power View sheet in Excel, select the table you created in the previous post Set field defaults in PowerPivot


• From the ribbon, select DESIGN -> Table -> Card.

• The table you created changes into a collection of Cards; the data is the same, but the visualization of the data has changed. The table now looks like the following screen.

Notice that the Sport field is larger than the rest, and appears as a heading for each card. That’s because we set Sport as the Default Label in the Table Behavior window when we were in Power Pivot.

I will come up with more details in my upcoming posts. Till then Stay Tuned, Keep Learning & Practicing.