All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
I was looking at my blog stats and found that some of the most popular posts are almost 10 years old (yes really). Those topics are actually still relevant so I will be updating some those for Power BI in the coming months. Maybe not everything has changed but it will be a bit different with Power BI. So we will start by reexamining a blog post I did on September 22, 2010 to “Get... Read more
I am very happy that my new book has been released today! This is a brand new update to the book I released 5 years and now covers everything Power BI. You can order the ebook (a DRM-free copy of the book in all three popular e-book formats: PDF, ePub and Mob) or printed version directly from the publisher here. You can also get it on Amazon of course but the prices are a bit... Read more
A quick hack today. Got this question from someone who needed to be able to update a report and show users that something had changed. This is easy when you have access to a database and can add data to it but in this case that was not possible. So I came up with a hacky (and great :P) way to do this. and wanted to share it in case it came handy in your... Read more
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 version1 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