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Category: Power BI

Drillthrough in Power BI

Published 2020-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Cecilia Brusatori takes us through Power BI’s drillthrough capabilities:

The drillthrough feature in Power BI will let you let you go into more detail about a specific column in a visualization.

In the most simple way, you can enable a feature that will let you right click on a visual containing the specified column, and take you to a whole different page inside your report where you created more content to provide more details related to that same column.

Click through for an example.

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Time Series + Power BI Aggregations

Published 2020-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson answers a couple of questions around aggregations and time series in Power BI:

I have received a couple of questions about Aggregations in Power BI and whether they can be used to cover time series calculations such as Year to Date, Quarter to Date, and Month To Date. The answer is yes. Since time series calculations break down into calculations over a series of days, an aggregation table defined at day level with the basic summarization methods (min, max, sum, count) and the right relationship with a Date dimension, can answer Year to Date, Quarter to Date, and Month To Date calculations.

Let’s take a quick look at one such calcualtion and how it can be covered with an aggration. I am going to use the same version of AdventureWorks sample database and Power BI model that I used in my previous blog post on aggregations, with a few changes.

Read on for a demonstration.

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Using the Power BI Color Picker

Published 2020-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld walks us through the Power BI color picker:

The new color picker allows colors in RGB format in addition to the hex color format that Power BI has used exclusively until now.

The new one also easily allows users to choose from a wider selection of shades and tones. This builds upon the simpler selection of hues and tints in the original.

In case you don’t know what David means, there is an excellent explanation of each term.

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Power BI Year in Review

Published 2019-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge walks us through the biggest changes to Power BI in 2019:

As the end of the year closes I was reminiscing on what a huge year it has been for Power BI. I work mostly with large organisations so my view will be slightly skewed towards that.

For me 2019 has been the year where Power BI got massive adoption as the standard BI platform in an organisation, it went from self serve to also contain corporate BI. 

The Power BI development model does have its downsides, but without a doubt, they get stuff done.

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Creating a Custom Power BI Filter Pane

Published 2019-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun walks us through creating a custom filter pane in Power BI:

Having as much possible Power BI estate when it comes to putting the visuals for data exploration, is everyone’s dream. But the slicers for “slicing and dicing” the data is also very important. Having all the slicers hidden has always been mine go-to design.

Several similar ideas have been shown, Guy in a cube (Adam and Patric) have both done similar ideas over past years, many questions have also been answered on Power BI community website. And mine requirements were similar:

1. have the ability to hide the filter pane
2. have the selected slicer items listed

Read on to see how Tomaz took care of the issue.

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Diagnosing Power Query Steps

Published 2019-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes us through the Diagnose Step button in Power Query:

As you might have guessed, it’s closely related to the Query Diagnostics functionality that was introduced back in October. Whereas the existing Query Diagnostics functionality allows you to see what happens inside the Power Query when a query is executed, this new feature does something similar but allows you to run a query up to a specific step. This is useful in scenarios where you want to reduce the diagnostics data you are collecting to a subset of the steps in the query without having to comment out a lot of M code.

It looks pretty useful.

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Auditing the Power BI Activity Log

Published 2019-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell shows how to query the Power BI Activity Log:

The new Power BI Activity Log makes it much easier for Power BI administrators to access audit log data to monitor and analyze activities occurring within the tenant they support. This blog post describes one solution for accessing, processing, and loading Power BI activity log data as part of an automated process to support ongoing Power BI administrative analysis and reporting.

Brett has a very nicely defined solution and lays it out step by step for us.

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Multi-Column Transformations with Power Query

Published 2019-12-23 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann shows how we can apply a function to multiple columns at once using Power Query:

You can apply simple transformations to multiple columns at once in Power Query using the UI only. In this article I show how you can apply advanced transformations on multiple columns at once instead. You can also use this to use custom functions instead. And lastly for the lazyefficient fans of custom M-functions: You will get a new “TranformAllMyColumnsAtOnceHowILikeIt”-function as well

Read on for a few examples, including one using custom code.

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