Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

Implementing a Star Schema for a Power BI Semantic Model

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic reminds us to keep Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit book at hand:

But, what is a star schema in the first place? I have good and bad news for you:)…The bad news is: I’m not covering it in this article, because this one focuses on explaining how to implement a star schema in Power BI (assuming that you already know what star schema is). The good news is: I’ve already written about it, so go and read this article first, if you’re not sure what star schema represents in the world of data modeling…

Now, let’s get our hands dirty and build a star schema!

Read on for the demo.

Comments closed

Building a Pareto Chart in Power BI

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Riqo Chaar get more than 80% of the way there:

The Pareto principle, commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule, is a concept of prioritisation.

It states that for many outcomes, 80% of the outputs are derived from 20% of the inputs. Although this isn’t a universal truth, this pattern has been observed in many different cases. For example, a large proportion (80%) of the revenue a particular business generates may primarily be associated with only a small proportion (20%) of big-selling products. This concept is related to the law of diminishing returns and poses the following question: If, after reaching a certain level of output (80%), significantly more effort is required to achieve further increases in this output, is this additional effort worth it?

In this article, we demonstrate the process (using DAX expressions) of creating a Pareto chart in Power BI.

Read on to see how you can build a chart like this. It’s a very popular style of chart for manufacturing scenarios.

Comments closed

Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model via Fabric Pipelines

Published 2024-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld builds a pipeline:

Recently, Microsoft released a new activity type to trigger Power BI Semantic Model refreshes. A great step forward to have a native pipeline activity and no longer need to setup complex steps with APIs and authentication manually. Or is there still a case?

In this blog I will elaborate on what this new Pipeline activity exactly is, various scenarios in which it can be applied and finally some edge cases and shortcomings.

Click through to see how it works.

Comments closed

Creating DAX Measures Directly in the Power BI Service

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers skips the desktop step:

There have been some updates to Power BI with Visual Calculations, and as of the March 2024 release you can now create and edit visual calculations in the Power BI Service.

Here are details from the blog post: Power BI March 2024 Feature Summary | Visual Calculations Update

I then saw an email which made me think, could I then use the visual calculations to create a DAX measure directly in the Power BI Service on an existing Power BI report.

The answer, it turns out, is yes. Read on to see how.

Comments closed

EXPAND() and COLLAPSE() in Power BI Visual Calculations

Published 2024-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari play the accordion:

In previous articles, we introduced the concepts of visual context, the visual lattice, and the two visual context navigation operations: EXPAND and COLLAPSE. In this article, we build on that knowledge to first compute a simple percentage over the parent: a simple calculation to consolidate the understanding of EXPAND and COLLAPSE. Next, we move on to a much more complex scenario, computing the inflation-adjusted sales using visual calculations.

Read on to see what the two functions do, using a pair of examples.

Comments closed

Ensuring Data Label Visibility on Bar Charts

Published 2024-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen figures out a way:

Power BI has 5 different ways of positioning data labels in a bar chart – Auto, Inside end, Outside end, Inside center and inside base.

Depending on the distribution of your data this can lead to labels are being hidden, cut off or positioned a way that looks strange for the user.

Read on for a clever solution to a weakness in Power BI’s formatting capabilities.

Comments closed

Migrating Power BI Semantic Models to Direct Lake

Published 2024-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic performs a migration:

Here is my scenario: there is an existing Power BI semantic model in import mode (in reality, there are many of them, but for the sake of keeping things simple for this blog post, let’s pretend that there is only one semantic model to be migrated).

Click through to see what the current state of the semantic model looks like, as well as the way to migrate. It’s not trivial, but Nikola does take us through it step by step.

Comments closed

Accessibility Features in Power BI

Published 2024-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska takes us through some of the accessibility features in Power BI:

As data professionals, we’re constantly striving to create reports that effectively communicate insights to our audience. Did you know that within Power BI, there are hidden accessibility features that can enhance the usability for all users—with minimal effort on your part? Today, we’re digging into this overlooked aspect of Power BI and exploring how these features can elevate your data visualization projects.

Click through for three features.

Comments closed

Displaying Azure Maps within a Power BI Paginated Report

Published 2024-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows a map in a paginated report:

The built-in mapping functionality in Power BI paginated reports is fairly basic. However the integration of Power Query into Power BI paginated reports gives you an interesting new way of creating maps in paginated reports: you can call the Azure Maps API using Power Query and display the image returned in an Image report item. In this blog post I’ll show you how.

Click through for the demo.

Comments closed