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Data Types in Power BI

The document provides an overview of data types in Microsoft Power BI, categorizing them into number types, date and time types, and other types such as text and binary. Each data type is defined with specific characteristics and examples, highlighting their uses in organizing datasets. The reading serves as a cheat sheet for identifying and understanding the various data types available in Power BI.

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Aya Laadaili
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13 views2 pages

Data Types in Power BI

The document provides an overview of data types in Microsoft Power BI, categorizing them into number types, date and time types, and other types such as text and binary. Each data type is defined with specific characteristics and examples, highlighting their uses in organizing datasets. The reading serves as a cheat sheet for identifying and understanding the various data types available in Power BI.

Uploaded by

Aya Laadaili
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Data types in Power BI

Introduction
As you may know by now, Microsoft Power BI connects with a range of data sources and works with many
different data types. Data types in Power BI are used to classify values to ensure a better organized and
structured dataset.

Data types are defined at the column level. The values contained within a given column are configured to
align with the designated data type of the column.

Every data type has some specific transformations and options that can be applied. As mentioned before,
the Transform and Add column tabs and the column filter options are primarily used for these
transformations.

You can use this reading as a cheat sheet of data types available in Power BI. Additionally, the linked pages
in this reading provide additional valuable information about Power BI data types. By the end of this
reading, you’ll be able to identify data types in Power BI.

When examining data types, the best approach is to categorize them into groups such as number types,
date or time types, and other types such as text types. This way, you can easily identify the unique
properties of each data type and recognize differences between types.

Data types
Number types

Decimal number: This data type can handle numbers with fractional values as well as whole numbers.
The maximum precision (number of digits in a number after the decimal point) that the decimal
number type can represent is 15 digits. The decimal separator can be anywhere in the number. For
example, 99, 99.50, and 99.20930 are all valid decimal numbers. One example could be the price of a
watch, $99.99. In another example, you could use the 15 digits of the decimal number data type to
store the first 15 digits of the mathematical constant pi, which is 3.141592653589793.
Fixed decimal number: The decimal separator always has four digits to its right and allows for 19 digits
of significance. This data type is useful in cases where rounding might introduce errors. For instance,
99.0000, 99.5000, and 99.2093 are all valid fixed decimal numbers.
Whole number: This is an integer type that has no digits to the right of the decimal place. It has 19
digits of positive or negative whole numbers, such as -10, 0, and 103. Its range is between -2^63+1 and
2^63-2.

Date and Time types


Date/time: Represents both a date and a time value. Dates between the years 1900 and 9999 are
supported. This data type is useful for keeping date and time data together. For example, a
spreadsheet with Purchase Date or Order Date columns.
Date: This data type represents just a date with no time portion. This data type is useful when you
need only the date element of your records, such as birth date or contract date.
Time: This represents just time data with no date portion. This data type is useful when you need only
the time part of your dataset, such as an activity start hour or end hour.
Date/time/timezone: This represents a UTC Date/Time with a time-zone offset. UTC, or Coordinated
Universal Time, is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time.
Duration: This data type represents the length of time. This data type is useful when measuring or
calculating the time difference, such as Activity Duration or Sleep Time.

Other data types

Text: This is a Unicode character data string. This can be strings, numbers, or dates represented in a
text format. The maximum length of this data type can be 536,870,912 bytes. Or 268,435,456 Unicode
characters. Unicode is an international character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to
every character across languages and scripts.
True/false: This is also known as Boolean data type, which has either a True or a False value.
Binary: This represents any data with a binary format. For example, a non-human readable format is
represented by ones and zeros. Binary files can contain diverse types of data. For instance, image or
video files serve as binary files that are intended for computer systems to interpret.

Conclusion
In this reading, you explored some common data types in Power BI, including number types, date and time
types, text, true or false, and binary data types. You should now be able to identify these different data
types in Power BI.

You can also refer to the following Microsoft Learn article on data types in Power BI for more details about
Power BI data types, type conversions, automatic type detections, and comparison operations.

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