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Category: Power BI

Explaining Totals in Power BI

Published 2025-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Sheil Bakhshi performs a comparison:

The long-running debate around how Power BI calculates totals in tables and matrices has been part of the community conversation for years. Greg Deckler has kept the topic alive through his ongoing “broken totals” posts on social media, often suggesting that Power BI should include a simple toggle to make totals behave more like Excel. His continued campaign prompted a detailed reply from Daniel Otykier in his article “No More Measure Totals Shenanigans“, and earlier, Diego Scalioni explored how DAX evaluates totals internally in his post “Cache me if you can: DAX Totals behind the scenes“.

This blog brings all those perspectives together from a scientific and comparative angle. It looks at how totals are calculated in Power BI and compares that behaviour with Tableau, Excel, Paginated Reports, and even T-SQL. The goal is not to take sides, but to clear up the confusion around what is happening under the hood.

This is a very detailed and dispassionate explanation that helps make sense of the debate.

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Using Field Parameters in Power BI for Dynamic Views

Published 2025-10-08 by Kevin Feasel

Annamarie Van Wyk demonstrates how to use field parameters to slice data in Power BI:

If you’ve ever built a Power BI report and found yourself duplicating charts for daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly views — you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common (and frustrating) dashboard challenges: “Can we see this by day? Actually, make it by week. No wait — what about monthly?”

Instead of building five versions of the same visual, you can do it all with one — thanks to Field Parameters.

Read on to see how it all works.

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Adding a Drillthrough Button in Power BI

Published 2025-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska adds a button:

If you’ve been building Power BI reports, you probably know about drillthrough.

In short: drillthrough lets users move from a summary view to a detail page focused on one data point. For example, you can right-click on Austria in a sales chart and jump straight to a page showing visuals and metrics only about Austria.

Sounds powerful, right?

The catch: most users don’t even know it’s been implemented.

The other catch: those of us sad souls using Power BI Report Server don’t get drillthrough at all.

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Finding Rows with Errors in Power Query

Published 2025-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers goes around looking for trouble:

In the past when there has been an error when loading data into the semantic model, there can be times when clicking on the View errors can either take a very long time to show those errors. Or in some cases it never shows you the error.

In this blog post I am going to show you an alternative way to quickly find the errors.

The column quality data preview option is absolutely worth keeping on at all times.

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Prereqs for using Power BI’s Analyze in Excel Capability

Published 2025-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven lays out the rules:

I think I now got this question 4 times in the last months, so I thought I’d write it down so I can reference it later, and point people to it

What are the requirements so (a group of) colleagues can start using Analyze in Excel?

Good question, let me break it down. 
In general, I think it’s also better to use Analyze in Excel than Export to Excel!
Reza Rad also wrote about why that’s important earlier.

Click through for the list of prerequisites and a few things to keep in mind.

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Tracking when Workspace Monitoring Throttles Power BI Queries

Published 2025-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb wants to know if Workspace Monitoring is throttling any Power BI queries in Microsoft Fabric:

A lot of new documentation was published recently around Fabric capacities, including documentation on how to size and govern capacities and how to troubleshoot problems with capacities. The latter has instructions on how to use the Capacity Metrics App to determine if your Power BI queries are being throttled; it mentions that you can also determine if queries have been throttled using Workspace Monitoring or Log Analytics but doesn’t go into details about how, something I will address in this post.

Read on to learn more.

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Conditional Formatting for Clarity in Power BI

Published 2025-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson tells a story:

Consider a typical sales dashboard filled with charts, KPIs, and large tables.

Users often have to guess what is important, read legends, or ask questions like “What does this mean?” or “Which numbers require attention?”

Many dashboards display data but do not guide users to key insights effectively.

Read on for a few different possibilities based around conditional formatting.

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Organizational Themes in Power BI

Published 2025-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu takes a peek at a fairly new feature:

Keeping your Power BI reports consistent, clean, and on-brand just got a lot easier. With the new Organizational Themes feature released in June 2025, Power BI now allows organizations to centrally manage and distribute custom report themes across all users. No more manual theme imports or scattered design standards.

Read on to see how it works, and hopefully your organization does not have terrible standards.

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Using Sankey Diagrams in Power BI

Published 2025-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson creates a visual:

Ever wished you could see exactly how customers move through your sales funnel, or how costs flow across your business?

A Sankey Diagram makes those flows visible, showing not just totals but how values split and connect between categories.

In Power BI, the Sankey Diagram is available as a custom visual from AppSource, designed to reveal relationships and flow patterns.

There are specific times and places for Sankey charts. It requires having a natural flow in your data—that is, you need different states of data, those states should typically only “move” in one direction, you have paths to get from one state to another, and there is enough variety in pathing that not all of the data is going to the same location. The more of these rules you violate, the less useful a Sankey diagram is.

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