Category: Power BI

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how you can run Power BI Desktop as a different domain account, even when your logged-in account is not on the domain:

This is not the greatest error message.

Fortunately, I knew that I could connect to the server so the issue was not with connectivity but more around how could I authenticate against Analysis Services.

NOTE: Analysis Services can only Authenticate against domain accounts, and that is why I got the error above.

Click through for the solution.

Matt Allington is on a quest to find all of the Power BI icons:

The benefit of this approach is you can leverage all the standard icons and then add you own icons as well, effectively extending the default icon set. But where can I find a list of all the names of the standard icons?

I asked this question in the Power BI Blog thread (as did some others). A list of names was provided by Francisco Mullor in the comment section of that blog post (sorry, I can’t seem to link to the exact comment). I have taken the information provided by Francisco and produced the following Power BI report.

Matt also fixes a display issue that you might run into when using these.

Sabrina Da Motta Zenatti shows us two ways to format the text on a particular cell or row in a table or matrix using Power BI:

Let’s say, you need to format the Sales Amount for all countries as a whole number, except for Australia.

See below two ways you can do it.

Click through for the two methods.

Chris Webb shows us how to speed up a query to get the maximum value in a column:

In part 1 of this series – which I strongly recommend you read before reading this post – I showed how removing columns from a table can make a dramatic improvement to the performance of certain transformations in Power Query. In this post I’ll show some tricks taught to me by Curt Hagenlocher of the dev team that can improve performance even more.

Click through for the trick and an explanation of when it works and when it doesn’t.

Chris Webb hits us with techniques to get the maximum value in a column using Power Query and M:

In this first part I’m going to set up the scenario and show you what I found out from my own experimentation. The really mind-blowing tricks shown to me by the ever-helpful Curt Hagenlocher of the Power Query dev team will be covered in part 2.

Let’s say you have a large csv file which contains a numeric column and you want to get the maximum value from that column. In this case I’m going to use the 2018 Price Paid data from the UK Land Registry available here. This csv file contains 1021215 rows, one for each property transaction in England and Wales in 2018; the second column in this file contains the the price paid for the property, so the aim here is to get the maximum price paid for all property transactions in 2018.

Read the whole thing.

David Eldersveld shows us one technique for adding a sound component to your Power BI dashboard:

Data sonification uses variations in audio to hear differences in data values. From an accessibility standpoint, data sonification offers another potential avenue to enrich your reports beyond methods pertaining to data visualization.

There are a few pieces that need to be assembled to enable data sonification that works in both Power BI Desktop and Service. While, audio has been used in the Power BI Service for awhile, Power BI Desktop has been silent until now. This post attempts to show how to produce audio tones in Power BI for greater accessibility. It also demonstrates how to blend data with a standard range of audio pitches.

It’s an interesting idea.