Category: Power BI

Reitse Eskens makes a move:

Before I get started, yes, I’m going to write about Power BI. If you’re not familiar with my work, the long and short of it is that I tend to keep a healthy distance from anything involving semantic models and reports. Why? In one word, pie charts. Sorry if that triggered you.

But every now and again, I need to do work adjacent to this; specifically, when onboarding new clients or helping them migrate things, I have to touch the Power BI stuff too. But rest assured, a lot needs to happen before I’ll actually start creating reports. Many people are more qualified than me to do that.

Click through to see how you can do this through the Fabric/Power BI portal. And if you want to see this made easier, vote up Reitse’s suggestion.

Chris Webb goes looking for unused objects:

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Semantic Link Labs now has tools with interactive UIs and showed how you could use this to view lineage and so Vertipaq-Analyzer-stuff in a notebook. I didn’t show what I think is the coolest new feature though: the ability to find the tables, columns and measures in a semantic model that aren’t used and which therefore could be deleted. There are tons of excellent third-party tools that do this available already of course but the advantage of using Semantic Link Labs for this is that you can automate the process of finding unused columns and run it from a notebook and, crucially, you have two ways of finding those unused columns: from analysing the structure of downstream reports and from analysing DAX queries captured in Workspace Monitoring.

Read on to see how it works.

Chris Webb wants to know what changed:

Here’s a situation I’ve found myself in many times. You’re called to help someone whose Power BI report is suddenly very slow. You ask whether any changes were made to the semantic model around the time performance got worse and the answer is no, absolutely not. You then spend anything from a few hours to a few days trying to fix the problem and when you find it, it turns out that someone did make a ‘minor’ change to the semantic model after all and this was the cause of it all. Wouldn’t it be good if you could see when things like measures were last changed? Well you can.

Click through to see how, as well as some challenges you might run into along the way.

Chris Webb works around a limitation:

In last week’s post I mentioned that while Power BI reports (unlike Excel PivotTables) do not support the Detail Rows Expression feature, it is possible to partially work around this limitation by using the paginated report visual. In this post I’ll show you how I was able to do this and what is and isn’t possible.

Click through to see how. I’m unclear as to whether this also applies to Power BI Report Server, though my default expectation is “No, it does not apply, because nothing new ever applies for Power BI Report Server, because Power BI Report Server users don’t deserve nice things.” But that’s just because of years of experience in not having nice things with PBIRS, not any specific information.