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Category: Power BI

Power BI Model Analysis via INFO Functions in DAX

Published 2025-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad is leading this interrogation:

There are many DAX functions for covering day-to-day business-related calculations using measures and calculated columns. However, there is also a set of functions that can be helpful to the BI team and developers in gaining insights from the Power BI model itself. The insights can include things such as the number of both-directional relationships, the dependency of the calculations, the list of columns in tables, etc. These functions are in the category of INFO functions in DAX. Let’s see what they are and how they work.

Click through for a list, as well as how you can make use of them.

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The Role of Padding in Power BI Reports

Published 2025-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska explains why padding is so important between visuals in Power BI reports:

Now that we’ve all learned to love rounded corners, let’s talk about another quiet champion of good design: padding.

You know, that tiny bit of space inside your visuals that keeps content from being awkwardly pressed right up against the border, with no room to breathe. Yeah. That.

The ideal here is to have densely informative visuals that have sufficient padding to make it easy for a viewer to move between them.

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Native Power BI Write-Back in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge comes full-circle:

Three years ago, write-back to Power BI was my gateway into the Power BI community.

Power Apps embedded into Power BI, enabling write-back to Sharepoint, Azure SQL and Fabric, and sharing those solutions with the community, have always been some of the most fun I’ve had with “work”.

However.

While Power Apps are relatively easy to build, the solution architecture quickly becomes complex. Especially when you consider governance, CI/CD and licensing, all of which balloons in size when you are forced to integrate with a new platform (Dataverse/Power Platform) to solve a seemingly small issue in a Power BI report.

Click through to see the new way to do this. It’s been a point of frustration for me that, for so long, it has been such a challenge to allow a user to annotate or augment data in Power BI.

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Controlling Selections in Calculation Groups

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari looks at calculation groups:

Calculation groups are often used to display options in a report to change the calculation of existing measures by selecting items on a slicer. However, only a single calculation item can be executed for a measure reference, which could make the semantic model harder to use when the user selects two or more items in a calculation group.

Two new calculation group properties, multipleOrEmptySelectionExpression and noSelectionExpression, provide a way to control the calculation in these conditions that, so far, ignored the presence of the calculation group, thus executing the measures without applying any transformation. This article shows how to use these features and provides guidance on using the feature in preview: despite not having a user interface to manage these new properties, the TMDL view in Power BI Desktop and external tools like Tabular Editor already allow you to create and publish a semantic model that uses these new properties.

Read on to see how these properties work.

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Sharing Power BI Reports across Tenants

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi does a bit of sharing:

In this post, we’ll focus on a practical scenario. One organisation, let’s call it Tenant A, wants to share a Power BI report with someone from another organisation, Tenant B. We’ll cover everything from verifying licenses to configuring the Fabric Admin Portal and inviting the external user. If you’re looking to follow along, this guide will give you a clear path to replicate the same setup in your environment.

Click through for the process.

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The Challenges with Sharing Power BI Reports with External Users

Published 2025-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi begins a new series:

Are you a Power BI developer or someone in a BI or finance team who needs to share reports with customers, partners, or vendors? If they are not part of your Microsoft 365 tenant, things get a bit more complex than just clicking the “Share” button.

This is a common need, especially in consulting scenarios, but doing it securely and correctly takes more than people often think. It involves both technical setup and a clear understanding of roles and terminology.

This post lays out the groundwork for the rest of the series, so stay tuned for more.

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Paste a List of Values into a Power BI Slicer

Published 2025-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English doesn’t want to click over and over:

Have you ever wanted to take a list of values from say an Excel spreadsheet and paste those into a Power BI slicer to filter the list? Like say you are only interested in particular set of items, but the list of items is long and filtering through a list of say a thousands values can take a while. I bet you have and this has been an item that has been requested for a very long time going back to 2017!

Well believe it or not, I just found out this week during a meeting with the product team it has been released!! 

Click through for the limitations, as well as a demo of how it works.

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Power BI Accessibility Checklist

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska has a checklist for us:

Whether you’re designing for executives using tablets, keyboard-only users, or screen reader tech, accessibility is not a nice-to-have. It’s a design standard.

Here’s the accessibility checklist I use in client projects and workshops—and now it’s yours too!

Click through for some good advice on how to make your Power BI dashboards and reports easy to use.

For another take on the topic, I recommend reviewing Meagan Longoria’s checklist as well.

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A Peek at Fabric Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev writes a review about writing back:

The May release of Power BI Desktop includes a new feature called Translytical Task Flows which aims to augment Power BI reports with rudimentary writeback capabilities, such as to make corrections to data behind a report. Previously, one way to accomplish this was to integrate the report with Power Apps as I demonstrated a while back here. My claim to fame was that Microsoft liked this demo so much that it was running for years on big monitors in the local Microsoft office!

Are translytical flows a better way to implement report writeback? I followed the steps to test this feature and here are my thoughts.

Read on for Teo’s thoughts.

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“Can’t Determine Relationships between the Fields” in Power BI

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain an error:

When you create a Power BI matrix, you drag and drop columns in the matrix, then add some measures, and Power BI figures out on its own which combinations of values to show. The process is so intuitive that we mostly ignore the details. However, Power BI sometimes cannot figure out how to populate the matrix, thus producing the error: “can’t determine relationship between the fields”. Adding a measure fixes the problem, but why? In some other scenarios, Power BI shows many empty rows, eliminating many of them only when you add a measure. Power BI shows a subset of the values in other scenarios, even when no measure is involved.

Read on for the explanation.

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