Category: Power BI

Paul Turley shows how to create burn-down and Pareto charts in Power BI:

I’m managing an Agile team project using Microsoft Teams – the new project management platform integrated with Office 365.  Teams is a simple and useful project management tool but it’s new and light on features.  Using Power BI, we want to show the hourly task burn-down for each two-week sprint.  In JIRA and some other more mature project management platforms, the burn-down chart is a standard feature in the tool that shows the number of hours or story points remaining, compared to the estimated number for the sprint.  Just as I began working on that, a client asked for some help creating a Pareto chart and it occurred to me that burn-down and Pareto charts are very similar variations of the same type of chart presentation.  These are not so much chart types as they are a set of calculations and techniques for displaying a desired result.

Read the whole thing.

Esat Erkec shows how to post a Power BI data alert into a Slack channel with Microsoft Flow:

Demonstration

In this demonstration, we will complete the following steps.

• Create AdventureworksLT sample database in Azure SQL (Platform as a Service)

• Create a simple report with Power BI and publish this report to Power BI Portal

• Create Power BI data alert

• Integrate Power BI data alert notification and Slack with Microsoft Flow

It’s surprisingly easy—most of the article is just creating the Power BI dashboard.

Imke Feldmann shows us how to get from rolling totals back to the original values using Power Query:

To retrieve this value, one would have to start with the first value in the year. This is also the value of the first quarter, but for the 2nd quarter, one would have to deduct the value of the first quarter from the cumulative value of the 2nd quarter. So basically retrieving the previous cumulative row and deduct it from the current cumulative row. Do this for every row, unless it’s the start of the year or belongs to a different account code in this example:

(Although for the data given in the sample, it would be sufficient to just take the year as a discriminator, but to be on the save side, I would suggest to include the different accounts as well)

That’s a pretty interesting approach.

Kasper de Jonge shows us how to generate a hyperlink in DAX based on filters in a report:

Thanks to two recent Power BI features it now possible to generate a link on the fly using DAX to go to a new report and pass in any filters. (Alsop imagine linking to your favorite SSRS report !)

In this blog post we will create a DAX formula that generate a hyperlink based on the filters in the report. The measure contains 2 parts, the first part is generating the right url to the target report using DAX and the second part is passing the filters to that report.

We will be using variables a lot in these expressions, more on variables in DAX can be found here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/query-bi/dax/var-dax

Read on for an example.

Reza Rad has introduced a new version of Power BI Helper:

Power BI Helper is getting new features every time, and this time, we got some exciting features; You can now get your M (Power Query script) code beautified and colorful with version 4.0 of Power BI Helper. We also get the row-level security information exposed through the Helper application. Both information above will be now available when you export the model information to a document. If you like to learn more about Power BI Helper, read this page.

Looks good.

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman shows us where we can find Power BI logs and what they look like when we load them into Power BI:

Second one is  inspecting the Reporting Server Portal log, (RSPortal**.log) that resides in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Report Server\PBIRS\LogFiles

We again load this log file via Get Data –> Text/CSV and then choose to view all files, as it won’t see the .log extension otherwise.  Choose the file and click on Edit.

The M query displays the changes I performed to format the data into something that can easily be worked with.  Because of the stagnated output of the data lines, this will format the error and warning messages, with the rest of the rows only having the Information Message fulfilled, the rest of the columns will be null:

Read the whole thing.

Chris Webb shows an example of including a map per row in a Power BI table:

Since my post last week on using the Google Image Charts API to create sparklines and small multiples in Power BI has proved very popular, I thought I would do a follow-up showing how to use the Azure Maps API to create map small multiples. Here’s an example of what’s possible, a table from a sample report I built that displays crimes committed in London (sourced from here) in June 2018 with one row for each crime and a map column displaying the location of the crime:

Be sure to read Prateek Raina’s warning in the comments, though.

Kasper de Jonge shows us how to embed SVGs into a Power BI table or matrix to show visual forms of KPIs:

Got a question today on how we can do KPI’s in the matrix or table with Power BI, just like we can with PowerPivot through the KPI functionality there.

This is where the great SVG trick from David Eldersveld comes into play, you can read all about it here in his blog posts: https://dataveld.com/2018/01/13/use-svg-images-in-power-bi-part-1 and this post by Chris Webb with even more cool examples.

In this case I am using his trick and a post I found on the community site to add a KPI to my table.

Read on for an example.