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Category: Power BI

The Power of the (Scatter) Plot

Published 2024-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler digs into scatter plots:

In many reports, it is common to find large tables or matrixes with a lot of information. Business users come to these reports to get the details they need to answer questions, make decisions, and take actions. However, these detailed tables can be inefficient, requiring users sort, drilldown, and filter them to find actionable data.

Consider the following example of a matrix to analyze gaps in year-over-year growth by product, and dissect those by region. In this scenario, the intended purpose of the report is for a sales team to analyze why we did not hit our revenue growth target.

Read on to learn what you can do with a scatter plot, either natively in Power BI or via custom visual.

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A Review of Powerops

Published 2024-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic reviews a new tool:

In the last 2-3 months, I had an opportunity to try and test the new external tool, called Powerops. This is an external tool developed by Truviz, the company you might already know as the creators of various Power BI “goodies”.

Now, you are probably expecting “another Power BI external tool that solves a specific challenge”…I’ll tell you straight away – you can’t be more wrong! Powerops is a mix of various existing external tools – think of DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, ALM Toolkit, Measure Killer, etc. – but it’s also more than a simple sum of the features of the aforementioned tools.

Read on for the full review. Pricing is free for the first two months, and then either buy a license or you can upload up to two files per month and remain in the free tier.

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Imputing Future Values with Power BI

Published 2024-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Joseph Yeates makes a forecast:

I recently had a requirement for a Power BI report to generate a forecast. The report data model consisted of daily amount information, which was aggregated and summarized in the report for monthly totals.

The data was current year to date, but for the remaining months in the year rather than displaying no data, the users wanted to impute the average for all of the previous months that did have data.

Granted, this doesn’t do anything fancy like factoring in seasonality or periodicity, but it is easy to put together.

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Date Calculation Bug in Power Query ODBC Code

Published 2024-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria files a report:

I was working on an imported Power BI semantic model, adding some fiscal year calculations to my date table. The date table was sourced from a view in Databricks Unity Catalog. I didn’t have access to add more fields to the view, so I was adding the fields in Power Query first, with plans to request they be added to the view in the future. I got some unexpected results, which turned into a bug being logged for the ODBC code for Power Query.

If you are only analyzing data in the last 20 years, you won’t see this bug. But if you are doing long-term analysis including years before 2000, you might just run into it.

Read on to see the bug, how you can replicate it, and three workarounds you can use to avoid it.

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Power BI Paginated Reports over Excel and Web Services

Published 2024-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shares an announcement:

By far the most exciting announcement for me this week was the new release of Power BI Report Builder that has Power Query built in, allowing you to connect to far more data sources in paginated reports than you ever could before. There’s a very detailed blog post and video showing you how this new functionality works here:

Given that this seems to be the spiritual replacement for SSRS, it’s good to see them still working on it.

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EXPAND and COLLAPSE in Power BI Visual Calculations

Published 2024-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari build on a foundation:

In a previous article, we introduced VISUAL SHAPE, the table modifier that adds a hierarchical structure to a table, which is needed to implement visual calculations. In this article, we introduce the concept of visual context, the virtual table lattice, and the two main operators to navigate in the visual context: EXPAND and COLLAPSE.

Click through to learn more about these operators and how they fit into the rubric of visual calculations.

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Migrating from Power BI to Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley gives us an overview:

Fabric is here but what does that mean if you are using Power BI? What do you need to know and what, if anything, will you need to change if you are a Power BI report designer, developer or BI solution architect? What parts of Fabric should you use now and how do you plan for the near-term future? As I write this in March of 2024, I’m at the Microsoft MVP Summit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington this week learning about what the product teams will be working on over the next year or so. Fabric is center stage in every conversation and session. To say that Fabric has moved my cheese would be a gross understatement. I’ve been working with data and reporting solutions for about 30 years and have seen many products come and go. Everything I knew about working with databases, data warehouses, transforming and reporting on data has changed recently BUT it doesn’t mean that everyone using Power BI must stop what they are doing and adapt to these changes. The core product is unchanged. Power BI still works as it always has.

Read on to learn more about Paul’s thesis and how the world changes with Microsoft Fabric.

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Creating Dynamic Moving Averages with Visual Calcs and Numeric Parameters

Published 2024-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen builds a dynamic moving average:

With the introduction of visual calculation in the February 2024 release of Power BI desktop (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-calculations-preview/) – this gives us some new possibilities to add calculations on the individual visual and some new functions gives us some exiciting options.

One example could be to use the MOVINGAVERAGE function (link) to and combine it with numeric range parameter to make it dynamic.

Click through for a video and a description of how to do it.

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Copying a Direct Lake Semantic Model between Fabric Workspaces

Published 2024-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant makes a copy:

In this post I introduce scripts to improve copying a Direct Lake semantic model to another workspace using Microsoft Fabric Git integration.

I wanted to do this follow-up after my previous post about my initial tests to copy a Direct Lake semantic model to another workspace using Microsoft Fabric Git integration.

Due to the fact that I want to show how you can work with scripts locally to create the repository that contains the Direct Lake semantic model. Plus, how to do this in a way that includes the new Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL) semantic file format.

Read on to see how it all fits together.

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Overloading Power BI in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens pushes the envelope:

In my previous blog on Fabric and loadtesting, I ended with not really knowing how PowerBI would respond to all these rows. After creating and presenting a session on this subject, it’s time to dig into this part of Fabric as well. There were questions and I made promises. So here goes! This blog will only show the F2 experience as that’s where things went off the road. And, as I’ve shown in the previous blog, the CU count doesn’t change between SKU’s, only the amount of SKU’s available changes.
This blog isn’t meant to scold Fabric or make it look silly, I’m the one who’s silly. The goal is to show some limitations, a way you can do some load testing and help you find your way in the available metrics.

Read on to see what Reitse has gotten into.

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