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Category: Power BI

Obtaining VisualIDs for Visuals in a Power BI Report

Published 2024-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar checks for ID:

Log Analytics and Workspace Monitoring in Fabric logs all the activities of datasets in a workspace. These logs contain dataset, report, visual IDs which the user has to decipher to get the full picture. Dataset, report ids are straightforward but it’s not easy to get visual IDs programmatically. Chris Webb already has a blog on couple of different ways to get the visual IDs. That blog was published in 2022 and in the Fabric world we now have a couple of more options.

Read on for two additional methods you can use.

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Custom Fonts in Power BI Reports

Published 2024-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska opens a can of worms:

You’re presenting an amazing Power BI report filled with insights, but it feels like something’s missing. The visuals are great, but the default font? Meh. It’s like wearing flip-flops to a black-tie party.

That’s where custom fonts in Power BI come in to elevate your report and add that personal touch. Fonts do more than look good—they set the tone, show off your brand, and make your reports more engaging and easier to read. In short, they help your reports stand out.

Read on to see how, as well as important reasons why you might not want to use them.

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Aggregate Functions in Power BI

Published 2024-11-19 by Kevin Feasel

Hristo Hristov writes some DAX:

At times when using Power BI, you want to combine your data to produce an aggregated value. The aggregation is performed over some criteria – frequently this may be time (year, month, date) or a categorical value. Some popular aggregation functions to apply can be Sum, Average, Maximum, Minimum, or Count. Typically, Power BI applies certain aggregations by default when adding data fields to visualizations. What if you wanted to create your own data aggregations? To achieve better understanding of the underlying data, how can you attain fine-grained control over the aggregations?

Read on for several DAX measures, including totals, running totals, moving averages, and day over day changes.

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Creating a Numbers Table in Power Query

Published 2024-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck builds a tally table:

Sometimes you need a numbers table (also called tally table) when you’re working with data. It’s a table with one single integer column that contains incremental numbers (0,1,2,3,4,…). In a database, it’s fairly easy to generate using either cross-joins or a generator function (GENERATE_SERIES in T-SQL). Recently, I needed such a table in Power BI Desktop. Suppose you don’t have a database as a source (or maybe you cannot change the database), so we need to generate this in Power Query.

Read on to see how.

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Bullet Charts in Power BI Reports

Published 2024-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler is number one with a bullet (chart):

A report visual is useful when it displays information in a meaningful context. This context refers to other relevant data that helps someone interpret figures in a visual and use it to make decisions or take actions. The most common way to provide context is to compare actuals to a target.

There are many ways to compare actuals to a target, and in this article, we will explain in detail one way to do this by using a popular variant of the bar chart known as a bullet chart.

Kurt lays out several ways to implement a bullet chart in Power BI, so check that out.

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Column Eviction in Power BI and Direct Lake

Published 2024-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley talks about fashion:

One of the core best practice guidance principals for Power BI modeling is to avoid including columns that aren’t absolutely necessary for analytic reporting. Every column uses precious memory and especially long, unique values that don’t compress very well. When consulting clients bring me large models that require expensive capacity licensing and pose report performance issues, my first inclination is to see what column data can be carved out of the model; and perhaps moved to another table for a drill-through report.

The product team came up with a very clever way to reduce the in-memory footprint of a Direct Lake semantic model: hold a popularity contest! The semantic model engine will only keep columns in memory based on their hotness. I mean this literally…

Read on to learn a bit more about the algorithm in play and how it differs from a naive Least Recently Used cache.

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Lexing DAX with PyDAX

Published 2024-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar reviews a DAX lexer:

The power of open-source and GenAI. Klaus Jürgen Folz recently open-sourced the PyDAX library, which parses DAX expressions to extract or remove comments, and identify referenced columns and measures. I used that library to create some demos for myself and then shared the notebook along with instructions with Replit agents to build an app for me.. 15 minutes & 3 prompts later I had a fully functional app. Give it a try : https://daxparser.replit.app/

Read on to learn more, including why I referred to PyDAX as a “lexer” and a few more notes of relevance.

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Replacing Blanks with Zeroes in DAX

Published 2024-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes us from zero to blank in DAX:

My post from a few months ago about the dangers of DAX measures that never return blank attracted quite a lot of attention – this is a hot topic on the forums and adding zeros to measures is a common cause of memory errors in Power BI. In that post, though, I didn’t talk about what the best way to replace blanks with zeros is if you absolutely have no choice but to do so. One of the comments on that post mentioned that visual calculations is an option and this is something I hadn’t thought about before; now, after conversing with the Gods of DAX (no, not the Italians, I mean Akshai, Marius and Jeffrey!) and doing some testing I can reveal that Visual Calculations can be a good choice sometimes, while more traditional DAX approaches are fine at other times.

Read on to learn different techniques for doing this, as well as when they make sense to use.

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Viewing Storage Consumption in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to know about storage utilization in Microsoft Fabric:

This blog post will show you how to understand what is consuming your Fabric Storage.

If you want to know how I got this data, please read my previous blog post View all your Storage consumed in Microsoft Fabric – Lakehouse Files, Tables and Warehouses – FourMoo

With this Semantic model below, I could also create alerts to notify based on certain thresholds. For example, if total storage in a single App workspace is more than 100GB send me an alert (This could be done using Power Automate). Or it could be on too many files being stored, or even looking at the Parquet file sizes and if they are too small they would then need to be optimised (for better performance).

Click through for the report.

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Solid Practices for Power BI

Published 2024-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley has the beginnings of a new series:

It’s time for a refresher and reboot on this important topic. Much has changed in the Power BI world, the core design principles remain the same, practices and architecture patterns have evolved over the past few years. Power BI has grown up in the enterprise space and Microsoft Fabric now adds new options and capabilities. Back in 2020, I began writing a series of blog posts titled “Doing Power BI the Right Way” and it has become my mission to evolve and maintain a current collection of the most important best practice recommendations. This has been my passion and topic of several conference talks, user group sessions and a book currently in development for O’Reilly that will help you prepare for the PL-300 Power BI Analyst exam and then guide you apply enterprise best practices in your solutions.

I work with hundreds of consulting clients who go through the same cycles, having the same experiences, facing the same challenges, many making the same mistakes, and many learning some of the same lessons. The purpose of this series is to share those lessons with you.

Click through for the overview, as well as an outline of what Paul will include in this series.

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