Category: Power BI

Brett Powell has a great post warning you of common pitfalls with Power BI implementations:

Overly Broad User Classifications

It might be tempting to classify users in the organizations into only two segments or personas such as ‘end users’ and ‘creators’. You might logically reason that ‘creators’ will be assigned pro licenses and be trained to develop and publish content while ‘end users’ will be trained on how to consume and access content.

This simple binary distinction may be appropriate when you’re first getting started with Power BI but I’d suggest a bit more granularity reflecting the significantly different skills, features, and complexity associated with developing different kinds of Power BI content. At a minimum, I split the creators into ‘Report Authors’ and ‘Data Modelers’ with the report authors learning to build visually rich and intuitive user experiences based on the robust, secure, and performant datasets created by the data modelers.

There’s a lot of good reading in here.

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Gilbert Quevauvilliers gives us an overview of what Power BI Premium is and what you need to know before using it:

A great place to start is to first explain “What is Power BI Premium?”

At the very basic level Power BI Premium allows you to buy dedicated capacity with additional features. 

Read on to see what that means, what you get with Premium, and how it can benefit your organization. Gilbert also covers the pricing model, which is important because this isn’t cheap.

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Joseph Yeates has started a series on creating financial statements in Power BI:

This post is part 1 in my series on creating financial statements in Power BI! I’m starting with creating an Income Statement. The source data and Power BI file used in the example below can be found here.

I loaded the source data into the Power BI report. It consisted of three tables:

– Fact table: contains dollar amount of transactions
– GL table: contains categorization of transactions
– Calendar table: contains date information for the data model

This will be interesting to watch, especially because this kind of task is generally handled in a tool like Reporting Services instead of Power BI.

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Reza Rad shows us how to perform custom sorting in Power BI:

I have previously written about how to sort a column by another column, and I used Month Names as an example. However, still, many are unaware that the same technique with slight modifications can be applied to any other columns. You can have a text column in your slicer (product category for example), and sort it based on a different order than the normal alphabetical order. In this post, I am going to show you how to do a custom sort order for a column in Power BI.

There are a few important considerations, so check out Reza’s post.

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