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Category: Power BI

Moving Queries to and from Power BI Desktop and Excel

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen shows how we can copy queries from Power BI’s Power Query Editor into Excel and back:

Today I discovered a way to easily copy all queries (including the groups) from a PBIX file to Excel without entering the power query editor in Excel.

In my case I needed to copy the data returned by a query and find it some much easier to get the data using Excel instead of generating a csv file from a visual in Power BI Desktop and importing that into Excel.

Click through for a step-by-step demonstration of the process.

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Dynamic String Formats for Power BI Calculation Groups

Published 2020-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge shows how we can build out different format strings based on calculation groups in Power BI:

One of the cool things of calculation groups is they cannot just be used to apply a calculation over your “base measure” but also apply a dynamic formatstring. You could do this without calculation groups before too as I described here. This method had one big drawback though, it uses the FORMAT function and when doing that all results are transformed into strings. This does help in showing the right format, but you lose a lot of other functionality like sorting or conditional access. Now with calculation groups we can do custom formatting and keep the data type. How does that work?

Read on for an example.

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Refreshing Selected Tables in Power BI Desktop

Published 2020-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers answers one of the great mysteries in life:

When working with Power BI datasets I often want to refresh multiple tables, BUT not all the tables in my model. (This often happens when I made a change to underlying data sources and I want to make sure it is working as expected in Power BI Desktop)

I recently found that I could do it by doing the following steps below.

When you have one or two big tables and you don’t make any changes to those tables, it can be a pain waiting for them to refresh. This is a great alternative.

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Calculation Groups in Analysis Services and Power BI

Published 2020-04-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge walks us through calculation groups:

In most cases the business wants to see some common calculations done over these measures like YTD, QTD, YoY% etc. That means you must make a new measure for each of the calculation over the base measure. This leads to measure explosion in your model as you need to add a new measure for each variation. Very quickly this leads to not four measures but sixteen and more creating a management headache.

In come calculation groups. With calculation groups you can create a group that can apply common calculation over base measures. It’s hard to explain so let’s just dive in on how that works.

Click through for a demo of how to enable and use calculation groups.

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Building FAQs on a Power BI Dashboard

Published 2020-04-21 by Kevin Feasel

Evan Rhodes takes us through building out a FAQ for a dashboard:

I suppose you could add a bunch of text boxes with questions and answers. But, what if you have several questions and there isn’t enough space? I’m reminded of something a fantastic boss once told me, “Never pass up an opportunity to wow someone and grab their attention with your work.” So, let’s add some wow effect to this by leveraging the bookmarks and buttons functionality.

Bookmarks and buttons allow us to create a user experience that is intuitive to the user and that allows them to navigate around the page easily by just clicking. In this case, click on a FAQ and the answer appears. Click on the FAQ again or a different FAQ… I think you get the point.

If you need this on the dashboard itself, this is probably the right way to do it—there for the one time you need it and hidden away the rest of the time.

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Mistakes to Avoid in a BI Platform Migration

Published 2020-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb covers five things to consider when migrating your BI platform, using Power BI as an example:

Every report has a data source and getting source data in the right format for your BI platform is a substantial task – so much so, that you might be tempted to put Power BI on top of the data sources you have created for your previous BI platform with no changes. However different BI platforms need their data in different formats. Many BI platforms like their data munged together in one big table, sometimes even with data at different granularities in the same table. Power BI, on the other hand, likes its source data modelled as a star schema (you can find out what a star schema is and why it’s important here). If you don’t model your data as a star schema you may find that you see incorrect values in your reports, that report performance is poor, and that it’s a lot harder to write the DAX calculations that you need.

Four out of the five fit just as well with any other data platform technology.

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Dataflows as an Alternative to Incremental Loading in Power BI

Published 2020-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann gives us an alternative to Power BI’s incremental loading using Dataflows:

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might have noticed my interest in incremental load workarounds. It took some time before we saw the native functionality for it in Power BI and it was first released for premium workspaces only. Fortunately, we now have it for shared workspaces / pro licenses as well and it is a real live saver for scenarios where the refresh speed is an issue.

However, there is a second use case for incremental refresh scenarios that is not covered ideally with the current implementation. This is where the aim is to harvest and store data in Power BI that will become unavailable in their source in the future or one simply wants to create a track of changes in a data source. Chris Webb has beaten me to this article here and describes in great detail how that setup works. He also mentions that this is not a recommended setup, which I agree. Another disadvantage of that solution is that this harvested data is only available as a shared dataset instead of a “simple” table. This limits the use cases and might force you to set up these incremental refreshes in multiple datasets.

Read on for more information.

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Installing Power BI Management Cmdlets for Powershell

Published 2020-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven takes us through installation of the Power BI Management commands for Powershell:

The first hurdle I encountered was the fact that there was already an older version installed. After some fiddling, trying to uninstall the old modules and going through the fixed described below, I figured the documentation was probably the best start, and it was. 🙂

Nicky documents several issues but was ultimately able to pull it in.

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Using Trello as a Power BI Data Source

Published 2020-04-15 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how we can use Trello as an input for Power BI:

Where I am consulting, they use Trello boards which enables them to keep track of what tasks are being done, getting done and how things are progressing.

An interesting question came up asking how much work has been done. And I thought this could be done via Trello and looking at the number of tasks in the boards that have gone from To Do to Completed.

Below are the steps of how I completed this.

It’s a mashable world.

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Incremental Refresh with Power BI

Published 2020-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb talks about a special use case for Power BI incremental refresh:

Power BI incremental refresh is a very powerful feature and now it’s available in Shared capacity (not just Premium) everyone can use it. It’s designed for scenarios where you have a data warehouse running on a relational database but with a little thought you can make it do all kinds of other interesting things; Miguel Escobar’s recent blog post on how to use incremental refresh for files in a folder is a great example of this. In this post I’m going to show you how to use incremental refresh to solve another very common problem – namely how to get Power BI to keep the data that’s already in your dataset and add new data to it.

Click through for the details.

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