Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

Power BI Screen Usage Comparison

Published 2019-07-31 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers compares the original Power BI service UI to the new one in terms of how much of the screen is available to our dashboard rather than the service UI:

I have seen quite a lot of chatter with regards to the Power BI Service new look and feel, which I personally really like.

People were saying that whilst they like the look and feel, it appears to be taking up more real-estate screen space. As well as others preferring the tabs along the bottom like Excel does.

I took it upon myself to do a quick and possibly quite simple test to see if the new look and feel make the report page smaller or larger.

The result was a bit of a surprise to me.

Comments closed

Easy Navigation with Power BI

Published 2019-07-30 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has started a series on storytelling with Power BI. Part one is all about navigation:

Providing an easy navigation is important for the usability of your report. In order to make it as intuitive as possible, you should think as an end-user. By opening a report, where do you expect the navigation to be?

If you open the first webpage you can think of, most likely you will find the navigation on top or on the left side. Which is totally reasonable (at least according to my opinion) since we read from left to right and from top to bottom.

By default in Power BI you will have the navigation on the bottom where you can switch between your report pages. But we just concluded that it is more intuitive to put your navigation on top or on the left side. So why not do the same with your Power BI reports? We can do this by creating our own navigation and bookmarks for that!

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

Data Virtualization and Power BI

Published 2019-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl explains how Power BI can act as a data virtualization engine:

But lets examine what we currently have in Power BI:
– a semantic layer and data modelling capabilities
– access to various data sources via Direct Query (remember, we do not want to load any data!)
– ability to combine data from those sources

The last part is the most important one here and you may wonder what I am talking about. And you are right, by default a DQ model is only linked to one data source at a time but you can add other data sources manually in the Power Query editor! 

This is where it get’s interesting and what this blog post is about.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

Filtering in DAX

Published 2019-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington takes us through the FILTER() function in DAX:

FILTER() is most often used as a filter parameter within the calculate function. OK, so now it is getting confusing. FILTER() is a function. There is another use of the word filter in DAX, and that is as a parameter in CALCULATE. Let’s look at the syntax

FILTER Syntax: FILTER(<table>, <true/false test>) CALCULATE Syntax: CALCULATE (<measure expression>, <filter parameter>, <filter parameter>,…)

This is one of the most useful functions in DAX and one you really want to know well.

Comments closed

Using the Power BI Visual Header Tooltip

Published 2019-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasani gives us several good uses of the Power BI visual header tooltip:

When we look at data journalism posts, most of the times they have annotations, explaining what visual showing or talking about measures. Again most of these data storeys are used for paper. But in the digital world, we do see these annotations more interactively. It is nice to have this kind of lil annotations for everyday reporting as well, and Tooltip Icon can be used for that purpose. Another thing is using canvas space wisely, it is important, and having this kind of hint helps us on saving the canvas space.

Click through for instructions on how to enable this as well as smart ways to use them.

Comments closed

Power Bi Dataflows and the Right Tool for the Job

Published 2019-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche answers a reader question and waxes philosophical at the same time:

– Power BI dataflows and CDM folders provide capabilities for bridging the low-code/no-code world of self-service BI with managed central corporate BI in Azure.
– Power BI dataflows enable Excel-like composition of ETL processes with linked and computed entities.
– Power BI dataflows can scale beyond the desktop and leverage the power of the cloud to become part of an end-to-end BI application.

But… This is just a list of features.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

Top Products Per Group in Power BI

Published 2019-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo shows how you can display just the top few products in each grouping using Power BI:

A common approach to this scenario is to create a complex measure that hides the result if the element should not be displayed. In other words, it computes the ranking of the product and it blanks out the result if the ranking is larger than three. Though easy to implement, this approach requires modifying all the measures that should be displayed in a visual and negatively impacts performance. A better solution is to create a specific measure to use in the visual-level filter: that measure is executed only once for each product to define the set of visible items, without requiring any change to the other measures used in the visualization. We will see different options to solve the scenario.

Marco shows off a few techniques to get this done.

Comments closed

Power BI Conditional Formatting and Icons

Published 2019-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington shows how you can now use icons as the output of conditional formatting in Power BI:

Note how the icons above have both shape and colour so you can differentiate between them even if you are colour blind.  This is best practice.

You can also change the default formatting to work on the hard coded number settings that you specify. In the example below I have changed the settings to work on absolute numbers instead of percentages (note the changes in the highlighted boxes).  Also note that I have set the minimum and maximum numbers shown as 1 and 2.  To do this, simply delete the value in these boxes.  Thanks to Chris Webb for finally helping me understand how this works.

It’s easy to go overboard with this, but I’m happy to see conditional formatted icons in place; done right, you can pack a lot of information into a small space with them.

Comments closed

Power Query FILTER()

Published 2019-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie takes us through a good use of FILTER() in DAX:

The thing both of those formulas have in common is that they are using a measure in the filter argument of the CALCULATE function.  In both examples here, I’ve highlighted the offending measure in yellow.

CALCULATE([Sightings per Year], [Avg Sighting Length in Mins]>6)

CALCULATE([Sightings per Year],
Observations[TTL Min]>[Avg Sighting Length in Mins])

In the first formula, I was trying to use a measure on the left side of the comparison, and in the second, I was trying to use a measure on the right side of the comparison.  Both are illegal.

Read on to see why and how you can use FILTER() to solve these problems.

Comments closed

Removing Text Between Delimiters in Power Query

Published 2019-07-16 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann has a new M function for us:

While there is a native function to fetch text between 2 delimiters in Power Query, there is no such function that removes the text instead. Therefore I’ve created a custom function Text.RemoveBetweenDelimiter. It even lets you choose to remove the delimiters themselves as well via the optional 4th parameter.

Click through for the script and sample uses.

Comments closed