A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Erik Svensen figures out a way:
Power BI has 5 different ways of positioning data labels in a bar chart – Auto, Inside end, Outside end, Inside center and inside base.
Depending on the distribution of your data this can lead to labels are being hidden, cut off or positioned a way that looks strange for the user.
Read on for a clever solution to a weakness in Power BI’s formatting capabilities.
Leave a CommentElena Drakulevska takes us through some of the accessibility features in Power BI:
As data professionals, we’re constantly striving to create reports that effectively communicate insights to our audience. Did you know that within Power BI, there are hidden accessibility features that can enhance the usability for all users—with minimal effort on your part? Today, we’re digging into this overlooked aspect of Power BI and exploring how these features can elevate your data visualization projects.
Click through for three features.
Leave a CommentNikola Ilic performs a migration:
Here is my scenario: there is an existing Power BI semantic model in import mode (in reality, there are many of them, but for the sake of keeping things simple for this blog post, let’s pretend that there is only one semantic model to be migrated).
Click through to see what the current state of the semantic model looks like, as well as the way to migrate. It’s not trivial, but Nikola does take us through it step by step.
Leave a CommentChris Webb shows a map in a paginated report:
The built-in mapping functionality in Power BI paginated reports is fairly basic. However the integration of Power Query into Power BI paginated reports gives you an interesting new way of creating maps in paginated reports: you can call the Azure Maps API using Power Query and display the image returned in an Image report item. In this blog post I’ll show you how.
Click through for the demo.
Leave a CommentKurt Buhler digs into scatter plots:
In many reports, it is common to find large tables or matrixes with a lot of information. Business users come to these reports to get the details they need to answer questions, make decisions, and take actions. However, these detailed tables can be inefficient, requiring users sort, drilldown, and filter them to find actionable data.
Consider the following example of a matrix to analyze gaps in year-over-year growth by product, and dissect those by region. In this scenario, the intended purpose of the report is for a sales team to analyze why we did not hit our revenue growth target.
Read on to learn what you can do with a scatter plot, either natively in Power BI or via custom visual.
Leave a CommentNikola Ilic reviews a new tool:
In the last 2-3 months, I had an opportunity to try and test the new external tool, called Powerops. This is an external tool developed by Truviz, the company you might already know as the creators of various Power BI “goodies”.
Now, you are probably expecting “another Power BI external tool that solves a specific challenge”…I’ll tell you straight away – you can’t be more wrong! Powerops is a mix of various existing external tools – think of DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, Measure Killer, etc. – but it’s also more than a simple sum of the features of the aforementioned tools.
Read on for the full review. Pricing is free for the first two months, and then either buy a license or you can upload up to two files per month and remain in the free tier.
Leave a CommentJoseph Yeates makes a forecast:
I recently had a requirement for a Power BI report to generate a forecast. The report data model consisted of daily amount information, which was aggregated and summarized in the report for monthly totals.
The data was current year to date, but for the remaining months in the year rather than displaying no data, the users wanted to impute the average for all of the previous months that did have data.
Granted, this doesn’t do anything fancy like factoring in seasonality or periodicity, but it is easy to put together.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria files a report:
I was working on an imported Power BI semantic model, adding some fiscal year calculations to my date table. The date table was sourced from a view in Databricks Unity Catalog. I didn’t have access to add more fields to the view, so I was adding the fields in Power Query first, with plans to request they be added to the view in the future. I got some unexpected results, which turned into a bug being logged for the ODBC code for Power Query.
If you are only analyzing data in the last 20 years, you won’t see this bug. But if you are doing long-term analysis including years before 2000, you might just run into it.
Read on to see the bug, how you can replicate it, and three workarounds you can use to avoid it.
Comments closedChris Webb shares an announcement:
By far the most exciting announcement for me this week was the new release of Power BI Report Builder that has Power Query built in, allowing you to connect to far more data sources in paginated reports than you ever could before. There’s a very detailed blog post and video showing you how this new functionality works here:
Given that this seems to be the spiritual replacement for SSRS, it’s good to see them still working on it.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari build on a foundation:
In a previous article, we introduced VISUAL SHAPE, the table modifier that adds a hierarchical structure to a table, which is needed to implement visual calculations. In this article, we introduce the concept of visual context, the virtual table lattice, and the two main operators to navigate in the visual context: EXPAND and COLLAPSE.
Click through to learn more about these operators and how they fit into the rubric of visual calculations.
Comments closed