PowerBI Matrix Visual - Replacing Blank with Zero (harder than I thought)

Question

I am trying to replace blanks with zero in a matrix visual, but the traditional method of adding +0 is causing another problem. I have the case described below in detail. Thank you so much for any help anyone may be able to offer!

I have a (fictitious) company with 60 employees located in 5 regions (Midwest, Northeast, Pacific, and Southwest). Each employee holds an occupational type (such as chemist, auditor, geologist, truck driver, etc.). Across the entire company, there are 18 different occupational types. Additionally, each region considers some of the occupations as critical and others as non-critical and the critical vs. non-critical occupation types vary by region. If the occupation is critical for a particular region, the occupational title (e.g. chemist) should appear in the visual and if the occupation is non-critical, the generic title ‘Non-Critical’ should appear instead of the occupational title.

To accomplish this, my PowerBI model has two related tables – employee list (dimension table/many) and occupation list (fact table/one). Each employee on the employee list has a match code that is related to the match code on the occupation list to determine if the occupation is critical or non-critical for that employee’s region. If the occupation is critical, the related field (that will be used on the row field of the visual will be the occupational title. If non-critical, the related field will be the generic title ‘Non-Critical’.
Here’s an example of three records from the employee list fact table:

Image A

And here’s an example of some records from the occupational list dimension table:

Image B

The purpose of the visual is to show the count of employees onboard at two points in time (called FY20 and FY21) by occupational type with a slicer to filter by region.
The employee count is produced using the measure =COUNTROWS(Employee List)
Everything works great at this point. Here is an example of the visual filtered to Midwest, which correctly shows the Midwest Region’s 10 critical occupations broken out by occupational title and the employee counts. (non-critical count also correctly shown)

Image C

And as a second example, here is the view filtered to the Pacific Region showing the Pacific’s 3 critical occupations (non-critical also correctly show):

Image D

My only goal with this visual is to display zero instead of a blank for those cases where there are no employees. When I modify the measure to: =COUNTROWS(Employee List) + 0 I get the following result (filtering to Midwest for example):

Image E

So, the result is that the formula did replace the blanks with zeros, but now all the entire company’s 18 critical occupations are displayed and not just the 10 for the Midwest. The counts are still correct for the Midwest, but I only want to show the Midwest occupations as they were appearing correctly before I added +0 to the measure. If I try to simply filter them out at the visual level, then they will stay filtered when I switch region where they should be unfiltered. It seems the behavior is that a blank being replaced by a value (0) means that when there is a combination for which there is no data (such as Midwest/Chemist), the visual will still show 0 as a result for that combination.

I’m looking for anything I can do to replace blanks with zero and not displace the occupation types that don’t apply for the region. I would appreciate any assistance as I’ve been thinking about this for hours and have hit a wall. Thank you!

Answer 1

It looks like a fairly simple (if possibly temporary) solution is available for this problem by using conditional/advanced filtering on the visual. I set the advanced filter to show when the value is not 0 and this seemed to take care of it. Thank you for the DAX code and I will explore those options as well.

Thanks again!

Answer 2

I suggest a measure on the following form, written verbosely:

# Employees w/ zeroes = 
VAR _employees = [# Employees]
VAR _totalEmployees = CALCULATE ( [# Employees] , REMOVEFILTERS ( 'Employee List'[Year] ) )
RETURN 
_employees + IF ( ISNUMBER ( _totalEmployees ) , 0 )

This will first check that the occupation type has employees for the selected filter context, and only tack on a zero if so. The column specified in REMOVEFILTERS() must correspond to whatever you are using in your visualization - it is used to modify the filter context.