PowerBI Improvements: Manual Sorting, Grouping linked KPIs

The Unit of Measure is in the process of being deployed.

The category label value is planned for Q3 release

Please see below email sent by IBM Product team. Please confirm this feature will be deployed in Q3 2026

To clarify on the KPI Order Name, in addition to the unit of measure value for social metrics.

The account style configuration will have new options for data entry.

A “Unit of Measure” value, and a “Category Label” value. 

These two values will be added as new columns to the “Social Metric” table.

Note: These fields will not be available in the column based “Social Metrics” table, as the field structure of that table will not allow for extra attribute fields.

The steps to update the configuration to use these fields would be as follows

1. The account style fields will need to be updated to add the data to these fields
   1. This can be completed in bulk using a template if required
2. The dataset will need to be refreshed and then the offline data model connection updated
3. This will most likely require the schema refresh process which we have utilized in the past to ensure that the data model has the most up to date fields and structure
4. Once updated and available, the report would need to be amended to include these fields where required
5. Please note that these fields are limited to the “Social Metric” table, any values returned from the column based table will not be affected by these fields as they are unable to be related in the data model

Hi @Guest

In order to refine the sorting of the field names in social metrics accounts there are ways to achieve this.

1. Rename the fields : as KPI fields are sorted alphabetically, adding a prefix to the KPI names will allow you to sort then using this prefix instead of the kpi name.
2. Create accounts : create accounts for each KPI group, and add an identifier to the account (through any of the free text fields available to accounts (source, id, attribute, etc), you can sort by this identifier instead of the kpi details
3. Use environmental accounts instead of social metrics : environmental accounts are able to be used to more flexibly return data, including the native ability to return units of measure, unit normalization, aggregation through the data type groups functionality and intensities using the ratios functionality. These functions provide you with more ways to aggregate and sort data.
4. Create a virtual DAX measure in PowerBI Developer to create a sort order based on the kpi name (replace kpi names below with relevant actual names) this option can have an effect of performance if there are a large volume of social metrics fields : the field created by the below measure can be used in a table, and sorted by the value returned as long as the field name is also part of the table.

KPI Sort = VAR _kpi = SELECTEDVALUE('Social Metric'[Social Metric Field Name])
RETURN
switch( TRUE(), _kpi = "Non-hazardous waste", 3, _kpi = "Hazardous waste", 2, _kpi = "Total waste", 1)

5. Use the fields from the "Social Metrics" table which is the social metrics kpi fields split by field name : add the fields as values into a matrix table and under the Values section of the formatting options, turn on "Switch values to rows" to return the data in the order of the fields in the "Values" section of the table.