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Category: Power BI

Adding Carousel Buttons in Power BI

Published 2025-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu builds a carousel:

Power BI carousel buttons allow users to cycle through visuals, measures, or text within a single report space—making your dashboards more interactive and space-efficient. While Power BI doesn’t include a native carousel visual, this guide shows how to simulate the same functionality using button slicers and field parameters. We’ll walk through several practical use cases, including switching between KPIs, toggling dimensions, and displaying text content, all with built-in Power BI features.

Click through to see how they work. I’m not a big fan of doing this on a proper dashboard, given that any visuals you’ve hidden on the carousel are no longer glanceable, but it’s a neat aesthetic idea for highly interactive reports.

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Power BI in a Microsoft Fabric World

Published 2025-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck answers a question:

We’re a relatively small shop that has been using Power BI for our analytical needs for years now. We’re very pleased with the product, but the recent introduction of Microsoft Fabric has made us a bit anxious. When comparing Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI, it all seems very complex and we’re not even sure we need it. What will happen with Power BI? Will it be replaced with Fabric?

Click through for Koen’s advice and thoughts on the matter.

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From Power BI Premium Capacity to Fabric Capacity

Published 2025-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge performs a migration:

So your old Power BI Premium Capacity has run/is running out, and your organization is acquiring a new Fabric Capacity to replace it.

Perhaps the organization even decided to take the chance to move the capacity region to something a little closer to home?

If you find yourself in this situation, how do you best migrate your contents of one Capacity to another?

Read on as Jon explains the migration process within a region (which is very easy) and the migration process if you need to go cross-region (which is rather cumbersome).

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Dynamic Pareto Analysis in Power BI

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari get us to 80%:

The Pareto analysis is an analytical technique used to identify the most impactful elements within a dataset, based on the principle that a small proportion of causes often leads to a large proportion of effects. For example, the ABC Classification in DAX Patterns is also based on the Pareto principle. However, typical implementations often face limitations. The analysis based on the Pareto principle commonly uses categorical axes, such as customer names or identifiers, making it impossible to leverage a continuous axis on a Power BI line chart. A categorical axis creates a scrollbar on the line chart when there are too many data points, limiting the ability to compare the distribution of data points in different categories within the same line chart.

This article shows how to overcome this limitation by introducing a numeric axis reflecting each item’s position based on the selected measure.

Read on to see how it all works.

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Query Memory Utilization of Distinct Count Measures in Power BI

Published 2025-04-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb does the math:

The series of blog posts I wrote last year on semantic model memory usage, in particular this post on the query memory limit and the “This query uses more memory than the configured limit” error in Power BI, gets a lot of traffic. Since writing that post on the query memory limit I’ve written a few follow-ups on common mistakes that lead to increased query memory usage, such as this one on measures that never return a blank. Today’s post is sort of in that series but it isn’t about a design mistake – it’s just to point out that distinct count measures can be surprisingly memory-hungry.

Read on for Chris’s findings and the explanation, as well as a couple of potential workarounds if you find yourself in this situation.

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Loading Excel from SQL Server via Power BI XMLA

Published 2025-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover doesn’t want to share:

Users want to pull data from tables in an Azure SQL database into Excel via Power Query. This situation sounds simple. However, I don’t want to provide direct access to the database for several reasons, including the potential governance and permissions nightmare. We have a Fabric workspace, and most of the data already exists in Power BI reports. How can we give users access to the data they need without providing direct access to the database for an easy SQL export to Excel?

Click through for the answer. This solution is a bit more roundabout than granting direct database access, but also comes with a host of security benefits.

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Binding a Power BI Report to a Separate Semantic Model via Power BI Studio

Published 2025-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers makes use of a Gerhard Brueckl extension:

The default option to rebind a Power BI report is to use the Power BI REST API.

This works well, but for a lot of people this can be quite intimidating.

Fortunately, Gerhard Brueckl, has created the amazing Power BI Studio, which is a Visual Studio Code Extension.

Click through to see how to install it and how to use this extension to rebind an existing Power BI report to a different semantic model, whether in the same workspace or even a different one.

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Snowflake Query Tags in Power BI

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes some of the shine off of things:

Since the November 2024 Power BI release blog post announced that queries sent to Snowflake by Power BI include a query tag I’ve had a lot of questions from people who couldn’t see this happening or wanted to know what the query tags contained, so in this blog I thought I would outline the current status.

It turns out that the query tag isn’t as far along as the blog post indicated, and there are some pretty big limitations in the cases in which there actually is tagging.

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Bulk Replacement in Power BI via TMDL

Published 2025-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finds and replaces:

It is great to see the advancements in Power BI with regards to TMDL.

Recently I was working on a customer’s semantic model where I was doing some optimizations in the semantic model.

One of the changes I wanted to make was to replace the Dynamic Format String for the measures.

My challenge was that there were roughly 40 measures where the Dynamic Format String needed to be updated.

I could have done this using Power BI Desktop, but that would mean making the changes 40 times.

Read on to see how Gilbert was able to make this change en masse.

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