How to Create Groups in Power BI: Get Overview of Your Data

Before we go into details, let’s talk about what happens every time you make a visual in Power BI.

Once you create a visual, Power BI aggregates or groups your data based on categories or values in your dataset.

However, there may be times when you would want to group some of the categories together.

Fortunately, doing this in Power BI takes no more than 10 seconds. We’ll show you how.

For this article, we’ll be using Microsoft’s free retail analysis sample.

To start, focus your attention on the ‘Total Sales Variance % by FiscalMonth’ clustered column chart found on the “District Monthly Sales” report.

Now, let’s say you would like to group the sales variance on every first month of the quarter — January, April, and July.

To start, select all of them by pressing ‘Ctrl’ + click.

This will allow you to multi-select elements on the canvas.

Then, right-click on any of the points.

Select ‘Group data’ from the options.

After that, the group will appear on the Fields list and added to the ‘Legend’ bucket of that visual.

Easy! 👍

In Power BI, you can modify existing groups as much as you like.

To edit any group, right-click on its field either on the ‘Legend’ bucket or on the Fields list (both works).

Then, select ‘Edit groups’ from the options.

You’ll then see another box open up.

Let’s add ‘Oct’ to the list.

All you have to do is click the value first, then the group where you would like to add the value.

In this case, click ‘Apr & Jan & Jul’.

Then, click the ‘Group’ button below.

After that, the value will be added to the group.

Sweet! 😊

As you can see, it’s quite easy to group data points in Power BI. As promised, it wouldn’t take more than 10 seconds to apply especially with practice.