All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
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
Thanks to two recent Power BI features it now possible to generate a link on the fly using DAX to go to a new report and pass in any filters. (Alsop imagine linking to your favorite SSRS report !) In this blog post we will create a DAX formula that generate a hyperlink based on the filters in the report. The measure contains 2 parts, the first part is generating the right url to the... Read more
Got a question today on how we can do KPI’s in the matrix or table with Power BI, just like we can with PowerPivot through the KPI functionality there. This is where the great SVG trick from David Eldersveld comes into play, you can read all about it here in his blog posts: https://dataveld.com/2018/01/13/use-svg-images-in-power-bi-part-1 and this post by Chris Webb with even more cool examples. In this case I am using his trick and a post I... Read more
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