Category: Power BI

Imke Feldmann takes us through an interesting scenario:

When downloading data from the web, it’s often best to grab the data from APIs that are designed for machine-to-machine communication than from the site that’s actually visible on the screen. Not only is the download usually faster, but you also often get more additional parameters that can be very useful. In this article I’m going to show you how to retrieve the relevant URLs for downloading files from webpages (without resorting to external tools like Fiddler) and how to tweak them to your needs.

Read on to see different techniques for finding a URL to give to end users.

Reza Rad walks us through creating a time dimension in Power BI:

I have explained about Date Dimension a lot previously and mentioned why that is needed. Date dimension gives you the ability to slice and dice your data by different date attributes, such as year, quarter, month, day, fiscal columns, etc. Time dimension, on the other hand, will give you the ability to slice and dice data in the level of hours, minutes, seconds, and buckets related to that, such as every 30 minutes, or 15 minutes, etc.

Time table SHOULD NOT be combined with Date table, the main reason is the huge size of the combined result. Let’s say your date table which includes one record per day, has 10 years of data in it, which means 3,650 rows. Now if you have a Time table with a row for every second, this ends up with 24*60*60=86,400 rows just for the time table. If you combine date and time table, you will have 3,650*86,400=315,360,000 rows. 315 Million rows in a table are not good for a dimension table. Even if you store one record per minute in your time table, you would still end up with over 5 million rows.

So don’t combine the Date and Time table. These two should be two different tables, and they both can have a relationship to the fact table.

With that in mind, click through to see how to create the table.

Prathy Kamasani shows us how to recover lost Power BI desktop reports:

A quick post, how many times in Power BI Desktop, have you clicked on “No, remove the files.” and then say OOPS! Well, I did plenty of times to discover this trick.

In short, you can find those removed files under Temp folder like many other windows application files. Usually, the location will be somewhere like this – C:UsersprathyAppDataLocalMicrosoftPowerBI DesktopTempSaves. This location depends upon which version of Power BI Desktop you have. Beware, these files will be removed whenever you clear your Temp Directory.

Auto-save and auto-recovery are marvelous things.

Reza Rad comes up with an interesting hack for Power BI:

I have a table for all customers, and I am showing them all in a table visual in Power BI. However, there are many customers in the list, let’s say 18K+. If I want to search for all customers who have “q” in the name, then I need to either scan the table myself, Or use a slicer with a search box, and search for character “q”, and then select all the names with “q” one by one! something like below is tedious!

Click through for more details and the opportunity to download a sample file.

Chris Webb has a public service announcement:

A very quick performance tip: do you have users consuming Power BI reports with Internet Explorer 11 and an older Windows OS like Windows 8.1 or Windows 7? If so, their reports are likely to be slower[…]

Click through to see why they’re slower and what you can do about it. Other than upgrade to Windows 10 or use a different browser.