"Power BI keeps forcing date hierarchy in visual – how to show flat dates

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Posted on by CU18071313-0

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a Power BI report and needed to show full daily dates (e.g. 2024-01-01, 2024-01-02...) under each month in a table visual. But every time I dragged my Date field into the visual, Power BI automatically applied a hierarchy (Year,

Quarter, Month, Day), and I couldn’t get it to show flat dates.

Even when I selected just Date, it kept converting it into a hierarchy. If I removed the lowest level (e.g. Day), it removed the whole field.

So I created a new column using this formula: FlatDateText = FORMAT(dimDate[Date], "yyyy-mm-dd") That finally worked — I was able to display the daily dates without hierarchy.

Did I do this the right way, or is there a better method to force Power BI to use just the raw date field in visuals?

Thanks in advance!

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CU11080544-3 2 on at

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"Power BI keeps forcing date hierarchy in visual – how to show flat dates

I had the same problem, and found how to fix it!

Clicking this dropdown gives you a choice between "Date" and "Date hierarchy" after you drag it into the row section.

Once I changed it, the School Year displayed 2024/Sept/1/09/2023 as shown in the tutorial video.

Hope that helps.

I've also noticed this only happens on the 64bit version but didn't occur on my 32bit version I accidentally installed on another pc.

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w.p 6,743 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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"Power BI keeps forcing date hierarchy in visual – how to show flat dates

Could you please give this a try and see if it helps resolve the issue?

https://powerbidocs.com/2021/10/26/how-to-remove-default-date-hierarchy-in-power-bi/#:~:text=By%20default%20this%20date%20hierarchy%20features%20is%20enable%2cand%20turn%20off%20%E2%80%98Auto%20Date/Time%E2%80%99%20%28under%20Time%20Intelligence%29

This is a known issue in this module, due to the different date type between dateLoanStart column (Date/Time) in Loan table and Date column (Date) in dimDate table. Simply, you need to change data type of the dateLoanStart column to Date only in Power Query. No additional column is needed.

A great detail posted here: https://community.powerplatform.com/forums/thread/details/?threadid=76cce9c4-0e48-4b46-a05b-af3924abcd76

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