Category: Power BI

Jonathan Jones has five tips to help you work with Power BI Paginated Reports:

Don’t use the Visual Designer, write your queries out first

As tempting as it can be to drop and drag fields and parameters into your dataset, I would not recommend it.  It makes it harder to repeatedly test, share the logic in the query, and see the results. Instead, write the script, whether it be in DAX or SQL.  Writing the queries is a faster process that gives you a lot more control over your queries.  If you don’t understand SQL or DAX to a proficient enough level, don’t panic, you could start the query with the visual designer and then convert it to the script.

When you’re running your DAX queries, don’t use the dataset query designer in the report builder, use DAX studio. DAX studio gives you the ability to efficiently query, format, and test DAX. As an experience it’s much faster and easier to show other people. If you are using SQL queries you could use SQL Server Management studio.

As a practice, when you’re trying to test the data, it’s important to get the data right in your queries before you place that data in your report.

Read on for the rest of the tips.

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Teo Lachev has a nice comparison of slicers versus filters in Power BI:

Besides the built-in cross-filtering and cross-highlighting among visuals, Power BI supports two explicit filtering options: slicers and filters. Which one to use? Traditionally, you would use a slicer when you want the user to easily see what’s filtered on the report page. But with the introduction of the new filter pane and slicer enhancements, the choice becomes more difficult. Let’s compare the two options:

Click through for a table of comparisons as well as some advice.

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Joseph Yeates continues a series on financial statements in Power BI:

I had created a measure to populate the matrix visual. It uses =SWITCH() to return the YTD amount for the revenue and expense row headers and returns a subtotal for the net income header.

To finish building the income statement, I needed to add two more line items: retained income from the beginning and end of the year. I had already created the categories in the Power Query Editor, so I had to update the DAX statement to return logic for these lines.

Read on to see how to add these.

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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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