Category: Power BI

David Eldersveld shows off how you can customize maps in the Power BI Report Builder Map Gallery:

One of the defining features of Power BI’s [paginated] Report Builder vs the current geospatial offerings in Power BI Desktop is the native support for ESRI Shapefiles. If you have worked with maps in Report Builder over the years, you may have used the Map Gallery. The Map Gallery offers a collection of built-in geographies, but you can also customize and enhance what’s available out of the box.

David takes us through an example of simplifying one map, but the same technique can help in other ways.

Erik Svensen investigates how to email specific records of data from Power BI:

One of my clients called me the other day and asked whether it was possible to export the selected order that was selected in the current report page – as she wanted to send the information to another user. I explained the export data feature from the visual action menu but she didn’t want to download a file and then locate that and then switch to Outlook and click new mail – type the correct the e-mail and attach the file – that was not very Power like – to much clicky clicky – because all the data was actually available when she had filtered the report for that particular record – the e-mail she wanted to mail the data to and off course the data she saw on the screen.

Hmm… Let’s see how we can use the PowerPlatform stack to solve this requirement.

Erik got everything working, so check it out.

Reza Rad announces an update to Power BI Helper:

Previously you could use Power BI Helper to connect to a model in Power BI Desktop and analyze that model, getting the list of all tables, columns, measures, alongside with measure dependency and modeling advise, and also documenting everything at the end. The good news is that now with having XMLA endpointavailable, you can connect directly to Power BI datasets in the service, and get all those functionalities with that.

Read on for the full change set.

Chris Webb has a warning for us:

Here’s yet another entry in the list of useful things I learned from Ehren von Lehe on the Power Query MSDN forum: Table.Buffer() does not buffer nested table, record or list values inside the cells of a table.

There are some important implications to this, so check out what Chris has to say.

Soheil Bakhshi shows us how to do conditional replacement based on the values of other columns using Power Query:

Power Query (M) made a lot of data transformation activities much easier and value replacement is one of them. You can easily right click on any desired value in Power Query, either in Excel or Power BI, or other components of Power Platform in general, and simply replace that value with any desired alternative. Replacing values based on certain conditions however, may not seem that easy at first. I’ve seen a lot of Power Query (M) developers adding new columns to accomplish that. But adding a new column is not always a good idea, especially when you can do it in a simple single step in Power Query. In this post I show you a quick and easy way to that can help you handling many different value replacement scenarios.

Imagine you have a table like below and you have a requirement to replace the values column [B] with the values of column [C] if the [A] = [B].

Click through for the solution.

Melissa Coates gives us three use patterns for Power BI Dataflows:

In this first option, Power BI handles everything. We use the web-based Power Query Online tool for structuring the data. Power BI handles scheduling the data refresh.

The underlying data behind the dataflow is stored in a data lake. However, since it’s fully managed, this data lake is not directly accessible or visible to the customer. As with most cloud-based implementations, the infrastructure is hidden under the covers. This is what is happening if your users are utilizing dataflows currently but you haven’t specified a data lake account in the Power BI admin center.

Melissa gives us a great summary of the three patterns, so read the whole thing.

Reza Rad explains why your Power BI data size might be abnormally large:

If you have a large *.pbix file, you can investigate what are the columns and tables that causing the highest storage consumption, using Power BI Helper. You can download Power BI Helper for free from here. I opened the file above in Power BI Helper, and in the Modeling Advise tab, this is what I see:

As you can see in the above output, the Date field in the Date table is the biggest column in this dataset. taking 150MB runtime memory! This is considering that we have only three distinct values in the column! Seems a bit strange, isn’t? let’s dig into the reason more in deep.

Read on for Reza’s explanation and what you can do to fix it.