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Category: Power BI

Head-to-Head Comparisons with Power BI

Published 2019-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie walks us through building a visual which provides head-to-head comparison using Power BI:

Yes, I know that NONE of the infographics above is a scientifically “good” comparison tool.  Too noisy, too flashy, not clean…  but every now and then you DO need to cater to your audience.  Engagement is the first step in the comprehension funnel, and in this particular example, yep, I’m trying to capture the eyeballs of an audience that likes this sort of thing.  The style of #4 is a decent compromise in this case.  Know your audience.

Rob takes us through an interesting journey. I don’t think I’d want to use that style too often, but to be fair, Rob talks about that in the snippet I clipped.

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Key Performance Indicator Transparency

Published 2019-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Treb Gatte explains how to build trust in KPIs:

Many Power BI reports and dashboards have simple, color-based indicators, commonly referred to as Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. These indicators provide a way to communicate the current condition of a monitored metric.

These KPIs require the data consumer to:
– Trust the data used to calculate it
– Understand the rule used to derive the indicator
– Understand the calculation used to set the value

Read on for good questions and a recommended design. Trust is critical, as people won’t look at dashboards whose data they don’t trust.

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Seeing Filter Results with DAX Measures

Published 2019-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to see the specific values involved in a Power BI filter:

I was working with a customer trying to get them to better understand DAX and one if the things that is difficult to understand is how the filtering works in DAX.

The challenge I have found is that when using filters in a DAX measure I cannot visually see what is happening within the DAX Filter.

Below I will show you how I can see the values in the FILTER

Click through to see how.

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Moving Dataflows Between Workspaces

Published 2019-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld (along with Ton Swart) shows how to move dataflows from one workspace to another:

Now, here it starts to become interesting. Let’s try to automate the manual steps to an automated process. To automate task in the Power BI service, we have to “talk” to the Power BI REST API. The Power BI REST API provides programmatic access to the report server catalog. For example, basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations can be done on folders, reports, KPIs, data sources, datasets, refresh plans, subscriptions, etc.

Click through to see how to do it by hand and then how to automate it.

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Finding Columns and Measures Used in SSAS Tabular

Published 2019-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge uses Power BI to figure out which columns are being used in an SSAS Tabular model:

I got an interesting question about being able to figure out which measures and columns are being used for all tabular models in a server, either by known reports or by self service users using Power BI. To solve this I decided to use Power BI :).

To get the required information I decided to capture and parse the queries being that are being send to AAS and parse the results Power BI desktop over a period of time. In this post I describe how to do it.

Check it out, and also read the comments for an additional tip from Bill Anton.

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Using Power BI Cards to Display Notes

Published 2019-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasani takes us through one use of the card visual in Power BI:

This is a long-overdue blog post. A couple of months ago, I worked with a client in Amsterdam; one of the use cases was to show key metrics, flags that need attention. The user also wanted to click on warning symbol to confirm, where the issues were, however, the user didn’t want a drill through, it has to be a left-click.

As of yet, except for button/action we can not do left clicks in Power BI. As the user didn’t want the report to open in another browser tab etc., so was thinking about other options and at the end decided to go for tooltips and symbols to show flags like below:

Click through for an example and an explanation of how it works.

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Top 5 and All Others in Power BI

Published 2019-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show how you can include the top N rows and include an “Others” aggregate at the end:

Power BI offers the ability to apply a Top N constraint in a visual level filter, so that only a certain number of items are visible based on the evaluation of a measure. A common requirement is to show an additional row that accumulates the “other” items, which are those that are not visible in the report like in the following figure.

In order to solve this scenario you cannot use the Top N filter of Power BI. Instead, you apply the filter in a special measure (TopN Sales) and you use a calculated table to accommodate for the additional row named Others. Moreover, you need an additional column to let the Others row appear at the bottom of the table.

Read on to see how you can solve the problem.

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Refreshing Power BI Dataflows with Powershell

Published 2019-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Porteous shows how to use the Power BI Dataflows REST API with Powershell:

I like to use my favourite scripting language to do this – PowerShell. Although we have the Power BI Management PowerShell module (MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt) to interact with Power BI, the cmdlets aren’t yet there to refresh or retrieve the history of a dataflow (or even a dataset) but the module can still help us get what we need without jumping through too many hoops (and as long as we aren’t automating the authentication, that’s another post.).

Click through to see how it’s done.

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When Power Query Hits Data Sources Repeatedly

Published 2019-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb answers an age-old question:

If you’re developing in Power BI Desktop and you think that refresh is taking a long time, you should definitely check whether the Power Query engine is hitting your data source more than once. There are lots of ways to do this. Some data sources have tools that show when they are queried, such as the Run History screen in Microsoft Flow that I show in the video or SQL Server Profiler. Other ways include using Fiddler for web services or Process Monitor for files.

Read the whole thing.

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