How to Remove Currency Symbol in Power BI

Working with financial data in Power BI usually means your numbers come with a currency symbol attached. While that's often useful, there are plenty of times when seeing "$", "€", or "£" next to every data point is more distracting than helpful. For cleaner charts, more spacious dashboards, or easier calculations, you may want to remove that symbol.

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This tutorial will show you three effective methods to remove currency symbols in Power BI, from quick formatting adjustments for a single visual to more permanent changes in your entire data model or for use in your more advanced reporting with DAX. Let's start with a look into scenarios for removing the currency symbol and why this is helpful.

Why Remove a Currency Symbol in Power BI?

While currency symbols add vital context and enhance professionalism in your reports, many scenarios will prompt you to remove or hide those currency symbols. For example:

• Cleaner Visualizations: If your chart title already states that the data is in "Sales (USD)", having a dollar sign in front of every amount displayed becomes tedious and adds clutter. For more minimalistic and aesthetic report views, the dollar symbols may get in the way of achieving a cleaner representation.
• Space Limitations: In some places (like Power BI cards or small charts), space is extremely precious. By stripping a currency symbol, you could free up pixels. This could even help in avoiding number abbreviations like "from $2.5 M to 2,500,000".
• Enabling Further Calculations: At times, when importing CSV or simple text files without proper header declarations, Power BI may misinterpret numbers as text columns due to the presence of currency symbols. Power BI just "sees" plain text, which prevents you from plotting a historical trend or performing any math operations, like calculating sums of subtotals. This happens quite often when adding raw data sources.

Now that we understand the situations where you might need to remove those symbols, follow along to check the various ways to tackle such scenarios:

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Method 1: The Quickest Fix - Using the Formatting Pane

The simplest way to remove currency symbols without altering your source data is by making on-the-fly adjustments. You may have a well-defined data model, but for aesthetic reasons, you may want to present specific charts or visualizations without currency symbols.

This approach is perfect if:

• You need to adjust a single visual or even some visualization while showing dollar symbols for other parts of your dashboard (e.g., cards vs. charts).
• Your numbers already have a suitable numerical format from your model (float, currency, etc.), not text/string.
• You aim for the quickest and easiest fix, without involving DAX programming or Power Query editing.

Step-by-Step Instructions: Changing a Single Visual

Let's take as an example a classic, well-formatted bar chart displaying sales, but for which you prefer a more minimalistic layout:

1. In Power BI's Report view, start by clicking on the chart where you need the numbers to display plainly without a dollar symbol. Go to the panel Visualizations, as shown next to your charting canvas.
2. Then locate the field you are showing in your chart (for our example, that would correspond to the Y-Axis). Right-click on it, and a pop-up menu should appear with a Format option available.
3. On the Values dropdown, expand any option until you reach the Value's formatting properties. Then click on the Custom format in the dropdown and proceed to the next step.
4. In what used to show as Currency with "$..", type zero "0". This step will remove any currency or dollar symbols as well as any decimal points.

The previous approach would also work for your visualizations (like tables or Power Matrixes). A more general approach is to have those values formatted as Whole Numbers:

1. In the visual you're modifying, go to the field where you wish the symbols to be hidden, right-click, and then in the Format section, go to the corresponding dropdown from that menu and select the option that applies (like for tables/Power Matrix).
2. A property from the Formatting section, called Field Value formatting, may now be seen. By expanding this option, a set of properties will appear per field. For our example, by clicking on the Sales field, we can either select the option Whole Numbers to hide the dollar symbol or choose the 0 format as previously mentioned for a plain number format without decimals.

The Data Type Approach -- When Numbers Arrive as Strings

Another common scenario is when you've imported raw text data (CSV) with your numbers as strings and with a mix of characters, dollar signs, and thousand comma separators. The column loads as text, preventing calculations or charts with trend axes from working.

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Step-by-Step on Using Power Query

To remove all such symbols and end up with the proper number/currency format, this can also be resolved with Power Query editing. Here are the steps:

1. Open Power Query Editor by clicking Transform at the Power BI menu.
2. Now find your table with these numbers as strings and choose your numerical column or field.
3. From the menu again, use the replace value to remove all $ signs, euros, etc.
4. Once there are no more dollar signs in all your number fields, you can change the whole field type (from string to number with decimals or currency) at the column header. By doing this, you are permanently formatting your data field, enabling future calculations, filtering, and plots.

DAX: Creating a Dynamically Formatted Measure

There may be scenarios where you, as a report designer, prefer your charts (or report) audience to have the ability "on-demand" to switch between formats. For example, a slicer that changes all your visualizations in the dashboard to either showing fully formatted labels or not (e.g., "$5K to 5000"). That would enhance your report's interactivity.

DAX provides the right set of functions to dynamically format your measures: from having the usual $1,000 format to more complex scenarios (a number that displays without dollar signs when less than 1000 and as text ('1K' or 'M') format in charts, for example). With the FORMAT DAX function, a text as a return is achieved from any value. Let me show an example:

1. Start with a new measure with DAX and call it something like "Sales (formatted)". Use this DAX formula: FORMAT([total sales], "#, -#").

That formatting syntax can also be combined with logic to return either one representation or another. For example:

• IF([some measure] < 1,000, FORMAT([some measure], "0"), FORMAT([some measure], "$ #,##0")). With that DAX measure, you're conditionally hiding any dollar (and even decimal), for lower sales (less than a thousand dollars).

What's more, with this custom measure, you preserve your base measure with proper number/currency data types for any future calculation while showing those measures with dynamically formatted strings.

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Final Thoughts

Removing currency symbols in Power BI isn’t hard once you know where to look. Whether you need a quick formatting change for a specific visualization, a more permanent data type alteration in Power Query, or the flexibility of a conditional Power BI DAX measure using the SWITCH or FORMAT functions as mentioned previously, any of these methods give you full control from cleaning up the charts' look to making your entire datasets ready for numerical operations.

And when you’re tired of managing currency symbols, connecting different data sources, and manually building reports, we built a tool to automate all of it. With a few clicks, you can connect your marketing and sales data sources (like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, or your CRM tools) and with our tool, you can skip any data wrangling and editing Power queries for your data transformation. With a single, natural sentence typed from you, you get your dashboards and even insights in just seconds. No DAX syntax to look for, learning curve, or formula writing. That’s what Graphed provides to its more and more users for all business data-related analytics.