Category: Power BI

Marc Lelijveld takes us through the different ways we can embed Power BI dashboards:

In the end of 2018 Microsoft announced a great new feature which allows you to secure embed Power BI content to client applications or sites and keep security still in place. Actually, it almost works the same as the publish to web feature, but then users have to log-in in the embedded frame before they see the content.
Not only to the security to access the report is in place now, also all other security features will still work. This means that Row Level Security can be still in place in case when you are using secure embedding. A lot of people online are really enthusiastic about the new features. Simply because it gives you the ability to embed your content on your website, web portal or wherever you want, without risking security issues.

Click through for discussion on the four techniques.

Meagan Longoria shows us how to set the tab order for our Power BI elements:

Tab order is the order in which users interact with the items on a page using the keyboard. Generally, we want tab order to be predictable and to closely match the visual order on the page (unless there is a good reason to deviate). If you press the tab key in a Power BI report, you might be surprised at the seemingly random order in which you move from visual to visual on the page. The default order is the order in which the visuals were placed on the page in Power BI Desktop, or the last modified order in PowerBI.com if you have edited your report there.

I had not actually tried to tab through a dashboard in Power BI, so this is news to me.

Wolfgang Strasser wraps up his 24 days of PowerPlatform series:

When I had the first idea of this blog series, it was just a vision – and now – at the end of this series I hardly cannot believe that I kept up and wrote those 24 posts.
It was
… more work than expected,
… more feedback than expected and
…  it was more fun than expected!

Click through for 23 links grouped by topic.

Matt Allington shows us one technique to get the latest version of a file using Power Query:

This pattern is common if your new file contains a superset of all the data.  It could be a transactional file that grows in length each time or it could be a dimension/lookup table (such as Customers) that can change slowly over time, and you always want to see the latest version.  My advice to all my Power Query students is “zero touch the file”.  In other words, your objective should always be to have the absolute minimum amount of interaction with the source files possible and push all the work into Power Query.  This will minimise the amount of work/rework you have to do in the future.  Thinking about the use case here “load the latest version of a file”, the question becomes “how can I make this zero touch”?  There are a few issues to consider including naming/renaming of the file and also archiving old copies of the file.  This doesn’t sound like zero touch to me.

Read the whole thing and check out the video.

Teo Lachev walks us through conditional formatting in Power BI:

If you have used SSRS, you know that paginated reports are very customizable, and you can make almost any property expression-based. Power BI is yet to deliver expression-based properties to change settings based on runtime condition, such as to change the font style based on the actual value or user selection. Currently, there are two places where you can use a DAX measure for expression-based formatting of colors:

Click through to see those two places. I think I’d like to see conditional formatting be a bit easier than that.

Annie Xu walks us through a couple of financial calculations and how to implement them in DAX:

The Excel XNPV function is a financial function that calculates the net present value (NPV) of an investment using a discount rate and a series of cash flows that occur at irregular intervals. Calculate net present value for irregular cash flows. Net present value. =XNPV (rate, values, dates)

The Excek XIRR(Internal Rate of Return) is the discount rate which sets the Net Present Value (XNPV) of all future cash flow of an investment to zero.  If the NPV of an investment is zero it doesn’t mean it’s a good or bad investment, it just means you will earn the IRR (discount rate) as your rate of return. =XIRR(values,dates,guess)

Click through to see how to do this in DAX, especially if your data is not in exactly the right format.

Prathy Kamasani has an interesting problem to solve:

In my current project, one of the user requirement was to have a filter on the Year Slicer. To explain in detail, we have various measures to show metrics for current and earlier measures. For example 2016,2017 and 2018. In 2016, we always have blank values for Last Year metrics, having empty values don’t tell the story well. So to tell the story, we need to pull three years worth of data but display only two years in the Slicer. The easiest way to handle this situation would have had a visual level filter on the Year slicer.
Power BI Slicers doesn’t support Visual Slicers. However, with the help of Selection Pane and Sync slicers, I did a quick workaround.

Read on to see how to use hidden slicers to  control what’s displayed to the user in visible slicers.