Conditional Formatting with a Text Field in Power BI

One of the things I like about my live, online training courses is that I get to hear great questions from the trenches from people learning DAX and Power BI.  Last week, John asked me how to apply conditional formatting with a Text field (not a numeric field).  I knew it could be done, but it required some brief research before I could give an answer. It is pretty easy to apply conditional formatting on a numeric field – this  feature was added to Power BI some time back. However Microsoft has also added the ability to apply conditional formatting to a Text field too in some circumstances.

Example

To understand the process of configuring this, consider the following simple data table.

I just entered some simple sample data using the “Enter Data” menu option. As you can see Project 2, Project 3 and Project 5 have departments associated with them while Project 1 and Project 4 do not.

Suppose you want to use conditional formatting to highlight (colour code) which of the Projects have Departments associated with them and which do not.

The Method

The high level process is to:

1. Create a measure that returns a colour as the result
   1. It can be a word, such as blue, red, green
   2. It can be a hex code for a colour, like #40E0D0″, “#FFA07A”
2. Use conditional formatting and use the measure to apply the formatting on the text as a rule.

Here is the step by step process explained.

To start with, I created a test measure as follows.

Next, I placed a table visual in the report and added  the columns project, department and the test measure.

As you can see, the measure identifies which of the projects have a department and which do not.  So this test measure has the logic required to go to the next step.

Next, I created a new measure [Colour Project], taking the logic from the test measure that I created above and modifying it to output names of colours.  This can be simply achieved by returning hex codes or common names of colours.