All about BI, Modelling, DAX and MS BI
Every now and then this request comes up, I want to sort by a measure that is not part of the visual. Even though it is not “visualization” best practice sometimes the job requires it anyway . So lets start with the simple one, I want to sort a chart on a measure not part of the visual. Let’s take this visual: Now instead of sorting by OrderQuantity I want to sort by the ListPrice.... Read more
Got a DAX question recently that I solved using variables. When I walked them through the solution someone exclaimed “I didn’t know you can do this with variables!”. Variables are a great way to divide tough problems into small logical increments. Today’s blog post is not about the actual DAX being used but more to show how useful variables can be. Read more
Got an interesting question recently where someone wanted to be able to switch the relationships automatically based on which slicer was selected. Take the following example: Here we have the same customer slicer shown twice, in this case we want to slice by customer but if the user uses the ‘baseline customer’ slicer the data should only filter on the ‘Baseline customer’ table and ignore the ‘Real customer’ slicer regardless if it is set. First... Read more
An interesting visualization pattern I have seen is that some customers want to be able to switch the axis on the chart dynamically using a slicer. Let’s take a simple model like this: where I want to be able to dynamically change the axis of my chart to be Currency, Country or Region using a slicer. Today that is not possible out of the box because you cannot have a single slicer crossing different table.... Read more
Usually I start my blog posts with an interesting question I got, this time we will do the reverse. I want to talk about a question that isn’t asked often enough: “Should I use DirectQuery?”. Read more
Just a quick post today. Power BI desktop has a feature to turn on the SSAS profile traces that allows you to see all the queries (DAX and SQL in DirectQuery mode) generated by the reports. I couldn’t find any documentation to turn it on so let’s take you through the steps here. Read more
A common questions I get is to change the connection string to from my report to SSAS after I move my Power BI desktop file into SSAS. It turns out this actually pretty simple as there is an API that allows you to copy and then bind the report to ANY dataset. Let’s walk through this. Read more
Another interesting question that came up recently is how to do currency conversion in Power BI. My colleague Jeffrey Wang had a very neat solution that I want to share more broadly. Read more