Earlier, we made sure to set the data type as Date in our date table. And this is essential in order to allow your date table to talk smoothly with the other dates in your model. In fact, it's crucial that all of your fields are properly formatted for their data type, and that their settings are ideal for their purpose. For instance, let's say our customers are mostly based in Europe, let's change the dates to display properly for Europe.

In the Model View, open up a table and select a field. The Properties menu is grouped into three different sections. Under General, the description becomes a tool tip when report builders hover over this field in Report View. We can also add synonyms for the Q&A feature. Add this field to a folder to group relevant fields. And we can choose to hide it or unhide it from Report View. Formatting is where we change the data type like to European dates. Or we could also change percent fields to always display as percent. Or set up currency fields that they always display as currency.

Let's actually use these in Report View. Cool, the dates look good and that percent is formatting nicely, and my currency. Cool, those work perfectly. But this other visual looks kind of funky. These are months, so I should probably display the month names here instead, I guess. Our report consumers might not know that these are month names. I'll just remove the month number here and replace it with month name. That's weird. It looks like this visual is ordering months alphabetically rather than by month order. That looks weird, let's fix this. Back in the Model View, under the Advanced tab, you can sort this column by another column. Great, we want this month name column to use the sort order from the month number column. Okay, looks good. Let's go see that in our report. That is much better.

Other options in the Advanced menu include formatting locations as a specific location type, or formatting URLs and barcodes. And customizing how your numerical data will default aggregate. For instance, are your month day numbers Summing? Set their default aggregation to none and that'll fix that. Now, when you add them to a report, Power BI won't calculate them. Also DiscountPercent, I never want to add that, I always wanna average it. So let's set this default aggregation to Average and now its default behavior is actually useful.

To wrap up this topic, let's scan and look at all the icons that are adorning each of these fields in Report View. By now, we should be able to visually confirm that each field is equipped with default behavior fitting its role. There's only one icon here that we haven't expressly covered yet, which is this one. This is a hierarchy, and often they are great, but some of them aren't great, and we need to know how to handle those.