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Category: Power BI

A New Financial Sample Dataset with Power BI

Published 2020-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes a look at a new sample data set in Power BI Desktop:

With the October 2020 release of Power BI Desktop, Microsoft has incorporated a sample dataset directly into the product. While there are a few commonly used training and demo datasets already, there are benefits to having a basic starter Financials dataset included.

This data can accelerate the learning experience for new users, particularly those who may only need to focus on authoring reports on existing datasets at their organization and don’t need to immediately know much about data modeling.

Click through for David’s mixed review.

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Getting Power BI to Write Your DAX

Published 2020-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows off an interesting way of using a Power BI feature:

Recently I had to get some data from a Power BI Dataset. At first, I started writing the DAX using the fantastic DAX Studio.

Then a thought occurred to me, what if I could get the DAX already written and change it to my requirement. This would save me a lot of time and effort. I love the quote from Patrick in Guy in a Cube “I am not lazy, I am efficient”

Click through for the scenario. Looks like it will get you at least part of the way there.

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Changing Power BI Data Source Credentials

Published 2020-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Martin Schoombee walks us through changing data source credentials on deployment with Power BI:

The method we need to use here is the Patch method. Why is it Patch and not Post like we did with the parameters? Great question, and the “devil is in the details”…the method dictates how the underlying resource or attribute is modified, and the Patch method in this case means that there are partial (and in-place) modifications to an existing resource. Read more about the differences between Post, Put and Patch here.

This is one of those areas where Power BI can be quite a letdown if you only use the UI.

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Mapping New Column Names with Power Query

Published 2020-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi reminds me of DB/2:

So, here is my scenario. I received about 10 files, including 15 tables. Some tables are quite small, so I didn’t bother. But some of them are really wide like having between 150 to 208 columns. Nice!

Looking at the column names, they cannot be more difficult to read than they are, and I have multiple tables like that. So I have to rename those columns to something more readable, more on this side of the story later.

Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this; click through for that way.

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Dynamic Format Strings when using Calculation Groups

Published 2020-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Alberto Ferrari shows off how you can dynamically generate format strings when using calculation groups in Power BI:

Each product in Contoso weighs a certain weight. The weight is stored in two columns: the unit of measure and the actual weight, expressed in that unit of measure. Specifically, Contoso uses three units of measure: ounces, pounds, and grams.

Because the units of measure are different, you cannot aggregate the weight over different products. If you author a simple measure that computes the ordered weight of products by using a simple SUMX, the result is wrong:

Click through to see how you can work through this problem.

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Power BI Custom Format Strings

Published 2020-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington is back from the future:

The ability to apply custom format strings directly inside the Power BI Desktop report view was first announced back in February 2020. At the time I was quite excited and tweeted about it only to find out shortly thereafter that it hadn’t been released at all! It seems it was a release candidate that was pulled at the last minute, but no one updated the announcement! Then late last week I was doing some work in Power BI desktop and noticed that this feature has now been released and is working (I don’t recall seeing a new announcement at all).

Below I show you how to use custom formatting strings in Power BI.

Click through to see how it works, as well as a couple gotchas.

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Creating Power BI External Tools in VS Code

Published 2020-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark takes us through creating external tools in Power BI:

For this article, I want to share a way for you to create your own Power BI “Helper Tool” and register it as an external tool in Power BI. This article carries on from some of my recent articles on how you can use Visual Studio Code to help automate specific tasks by taking advantage of the existing Analysis Services client libraries.

In my role, I often connect to AS models (Power BI or Azure AS) and often want to perform specific tasks quickly. The helper tool I share here allows you to connect easily to an AS model and then perform helpful tasks. I’ve deliberately kept the look and feel of the tool to be ‘old school’ like me. 

Click through for the step-by-step instructions.

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Changing Power BI Slicer Appearance

Published 2020-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasani has a video:

In my recent open data project, I created a single page report model with a sparse slicer. It’s a good trick for anyone who wants to make their slicer look a bit sleeker. Like any other visual in Power BI, Slicers also have many properties. By default, below is how slicer looks in Power BI, but I made few changes to make it look like the one on left, in a few steps.

Click through for the video.

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Validating Data Model Results

Published 2020-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley continues a discussion on Power BI data model validation:

We often have users of a business intelligence solution tell us that they have found a discrepancy between the numbers in a Power BI report and a report produced by their line-of-business (LOB) system, which they believe to be the correct information.

Using the LOB reports as a data source for Power BI is usually not ideal because at best, we would only reproduce the same results in a different report. We typically connect to raw data sources and transform that detail data, along with other data sources with historical information to analyze trends, comparisons and ratios to produce more insightful reports.

However, if the LOB reports are really the north star for data validation, these can provide an effective means to certify that a BI semantic model and analytic reports are correct and reliable.

Click through for more details.

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