How to configure a Power BI Visual to display string values in a matrix?

Question

I'm new to Power BI Visual development, and struggling to configure my data roles and data view mappings. I want to create a roadmap visual that has columns for each quarter across a time span, rows for each team that is working on the project, and in the cells showing the name of the deliverables that are scheduled for the various quarters. There can be multiple values in the same cell, and the same deliverable might appear with multiple dates to show that incremental deployments are planned.

(Apologies for the table formatting, during the edit it shows up correctly, but once I post it just shows up as text...)

My input data is something like this:
| Team | Deliverable | Date | other columns for further formatting... |
| ------ | ------------- | ------- | --------------------------------------- |
| Team 1 | Deliverable 1 | 2024 Q3 | |
| Team 1 | Deliverable 1 | 2025 Q2 | |
| Team 1 | Deliverable 2 | 2024 Q3 | |
| Team 1 | Deliverable 3 | 2024 Q4 | |
| Team 2 | Deliverable 4 | 2024 Q3 | |
| Team 2 | Deliverable 4 | 2024 Q4 | |

What I want to display is something like this:
| Team | 2024 Q3 | 2024 Q4 | 2025 Q1 | 2025 Q2 |
| ---- | ------- | ------- | ------- | ------- |
| Team 1 | Deliverable 1, Deliverable 2 | Deliverable 3 | | Deliverable 1 |
| Team 2 | Deliverable 4 | Deliverable 4 | | |

In my capabilities.json file I tried using categorical, table, and matrix dataViewMappings, but my problem is that Power BI expects a "measure" kind for values, which can only be numerical.

Any pointers would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

You can get this done by Power Query

Full Video of the solution in yourtube

1. use group by of Team and Date and aggregate (sum) on Deliverable column
2. you would get something like this = Table.Group(#"Changed Type1", {" Team ", " Date "}, {{"Deliverable", each List.Sum([#" Deliverable "]), type nullable text}})
3. you will get a column with error
4. replace each List.Sum with each Text.Combine this will get you result
5. use the table to create matrix and please new column to the value in matrix and you please around with row and column