All about Power BI, Modelling, DAX and Microsoft BI
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
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