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Category: Power BI

Power BI Security Features

Published 2020-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra takes us through different ways to secure your Power BI dashboards and reports:

Row-Level Security: With Row-level security (RLS) you are given the ability to publish a single report to your users but expose the data differently to each person. So instead of creating multiple copies of the same report in order to limit the data, you can just create one report that will only show the data the logged in user is allowed to see. This is done with filters, which restrict data access at the row level, and you define filters within roles. For example, creating a role called “United States” that filters the data in a table where the Region = “United States”. You then add members (user, security group, or distribution list) who can only see data for the United States to the “United States” role (the assignment of members can only be done within the Power BI Service). If a user should not have access to a report, then just don’t include that person in any of the roles for that report, so they would always see a blank report.

Click through for several more options and links to additional resources.

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Dynamic Binning with Power BI

Published 2020-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has fun with dynamic binning in Power BI:

In the previous article/video, I explained how to create dynamic bins by choosing the count of bins in a slicer in the Power BI report. In this article, I’ll explain, how you can do it the other way around, which is by selecting the size of the bin, you will have bins and buckets dynamically generated.

I like this for its ability to let you select the proper number and size of bins when Power BI is being particularly obstinate about something. In an ideal world, I don’t like this so much as a user-facing feature because we as designers should know the proper number and size of bins.

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Currency Conversion in Power BI

Published 2020-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo takes us through some tips when performing currency conversions using Power BI:

The rule of thumb is to apply the currency exchange conversion upfront. Therefore, it is a good idea to solve all the scenarios requiring a single currency in the report by converting all amounts at the time of data import into the data model. When you need to create a report in multiple currencies, computing data in advance could be challenging and expensive. Therefore, a dynamic solution based on DAX measures and a properly designed data model makes more sense.

In this article, we only consider the third scenario, “Data in a single currency, report with multiple currencies”. The second scenario could be implemented by transforming data so that it is imported in the model in a single currency, moving the challenge over to the very scenario we describe in this article. An extended description of the three scenarios with other dynamic solutions is included in a chapter of the Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel book.

This is quite a useful article if you work with multiple currencies.

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Building a Cartesian Product with Power Query

Published 2020-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how to build a Cartesian product using Power Query:

Sometimes, you need to create a multiplication of all sets of all pairs from two different data tables in Power BI. This action is different from Merge (Join) because there is no matching key columns and no way to relate the two tables together. However, you want to create a multiplication as a flatten table. If this process is needed to be done in Power Query, then there is a simple trick to do it, In this article, I’ll explain how you can do it.

Read on for that trick.

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Distinct Counts in Power Query

Published 2020-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how you can get a distinct count in Power Query:

You can have a distinct count calculation in multiple places in Power BI, through DAX code, using the Visual’s aggregation on a field, or even in Power Query. If you are doing the distinct count in Power Query as part of a group by operation, however, the existing distinct count is for all columns in the table, not for a particular column. In this article, I’ll show you a method you can use to get the distinct count of a particular column through the Group By transformation in Power Query component of Power BI.

Click through to learn how.

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Preventing Query Timeouts with Power BI Incremental Refresh

Published 2020-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how to set the default timeout for a query against SQL Server from Power BI:

This was because on the first refresh it has to process all the data before it can incrementally refresh the dataset.

As per the documentation the default timeout for a SQL Server database is set to 10 minutes, and when I am processing a lot of data it can easily take longer than 10 minutes to return all the data.

Read on to see how you can change that if you need to.

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Power BI and Tabular Model Relationship Types

Published 2020-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo takes us through the different types of relationships we might encounter in Power BI and Analysis Services Tabular models:

A relationship can be strong or weak. In a strong relationship the engine knows that the one-side of the relationship contains unique values. If the engine cannot check that the one-side of the relationship contains unique values for the key, then the relationship is weak. A relationship can be weak either because the engine cannot ensure the uniqueness of the constraint, due to technical reasons we outline later, or because the developer defined it as such.

A weak relationship is not used as part of table expansion. Power BI has been allowing composite models since 2018; In a composite model, it is possible to create tables in a model containing data in both Import mode (a copy of data from the data source is preloaded and cached in memory using the VertiPaq engine) and in DirectQuery mode (the data source is only accessed at query time).

There is quite a bit of useful information in here.

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Entering Data into Power Query from Excel

Published 2020-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Hansberry shows a quick way to hand-enter some data into Power Query from Excel:

One of the cool things about Power BI is you have a nice “Enter Data” button on the home ribbon where you can quickly add data to your model. The table isn’t dynamic, but sometimes you just need a small table to finish your model to add descriptions or some other bit of data without creating another table in a source that needs to be connected to. Enter Data is perfect for this.

It did take a little bit of trickery to accomplish, but it’s pretty easy to do.

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Writeback in Power BI Using Power Apps

Published 2020-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson shows how you can use Power Apps to write back to data sources in Power BI:

The Power Apps visual first became available as a custom visual in 2018 and then as one of the default visuals as of the October 2019 release of Power BI Desktop.

The Power Apps visual provides an important functionality to refresh a Power BI report page automatically which eliminates the need for the end user to manually refresh the page by clicking on the Refresh option from the Power BI menu to see changes in the data.

In this post, I will show you how to add a simple app to a Power BI report to update the data in the report and have the app automatically refresh the page. All of this can be done with a few lines of code thanks to all the work that has been done in Power Apps to make the app creation experience extremely user friendly and relatively easy to learn.

Click through for the demo.

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