15.4 Add Percent Calculation

Power BI does not currently have a native way of calculating percentages. In order to add percentages to graphs, often a necessary part of our work, calculated measures must be added to the different tables for the desired fields. This methodology is tedious and error prone, so I hope that it will change. Regardless of this fact below is an example for calculating a percentage.

First a calculated measure is added to the table that houses the data, in this case Table1. The objective is to calculate the Percentage by Race using distinct count of the Banner ID. The below divides the distinct count of banner ID for each ipeds_race_description category by the total distinct count of all banner_id. This value is then multiplied by 100 to turn it into a percent.28

% Race (IPEDS) = DIVIDE(
  DISTINCTCOUNT(Table1[banner_id]), 
  CALCULATE(DISTINCTCOUNT(Table1[banner_id]),
            ALLSELECTED(Table1[ipeds_race_description])))*100

  1. I have learned that this can be dropped and then the axis in the Power BI Visual can be updated to reflect a percentage. USing the axis is probably the better approach, but I learned of this a little too late to adopt it.↩