All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
Today I ran across a pretty straightforward DAX challenge that is made so much simpler thanks to variables. So I decided to share it. Remember folks use variables for each and every measure (even if you don’t think you need them). It will prepare you for the toughest challenges :). In this case we had a pretty straightforward table of survey results where we want to visualize the PCT of Yes answers by weight to... Read more
I recently did this webinar for Power BI in the studios in Redmond. The webinar goes into details on the data model with Power Query, importing data, relationships and DAX. I would recommend it for anyone who wants to get more out of their Power BI models so I am blogging about it today. You can watch it, for free, here: https://info.microsoft.com/Strengthen-Your-Data-Modeling-Skills-with-PowerBI-OnDemandRegistration.html?LCID=EN-US Read more
A short post today. Someone recently asked me: “How can I show the date and time this data has been refreshed last in my report and dashboard?”. Here are 2 simple tricks to help you visualize this. Show last refresh date\time To show the date and time of the refresh we need to store the date and time of the time refresh runs in the model itself so we can show it in a visual.... Read more
A while ago I came across this interesting time intelligence solution that doesn’t use DAX measures to do time intelligence but rather solves it through the model. The pattern was created by the great Greg Galloway from Artis Consulting and I am blogging this with his permission. This solution allows users to select time ranges from the model to be applied to any measure (and not build it in for every measure), for example YTD,... Read more
Today a quick one that I came across while writing a different blog post that I will blog later. I know we have talked about it again and again but a good best practice is to remove any high carnality columns you don’t necessary need. This trick is not new and has been blogged about before in different places but I wanted to emphasize it again due to the importance. I was finishing up my... Read more
In the November release of Power BI desktop we introduced a new DAX expression that is really great. Working with hierarchies in DAX have always been a bit of a pain, especially in scenario’s where you need to change your calculation based upon the level that you are in. The scenario Let’s take a scenario where the business has some special rules to calculate totals. For each total in the hierarchy the results are pre... Read more
Last week I was trying to embed a Power BI report into a SharePoint online page. I wanted users in my organization with a free license to be able to see the reports. Sounds easy? I opened the help documentation and went ahead. Unfortunately it was not as easy as it seems as the documentation was missing one crucial point (this will be updated soon). Steps to get it to work In the end I... Read more
I have heard this question come up now and then where someone wants to separate the names and columns seen by users from the names and users used in SSAS and in the reports. The main benefit this has is that name changes will not result in broken reports. Turns out there is a neat trick that will allow you to do this. The trick is for you to add a translation to the model... Read more