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Category: Power BI

Using Power Query’s Combine Feature

Matt Allington explains how to use the Combine feature in Power Query:

Now the good news is that somehow the combine button has done a reasonable job at combining the files (see 1 below).  Actually I wanted to unpivot the month columns, but I will come back to that later.

The bad news is all of the activity over on the left hand side.  What the…?  There are 5 additional “Queries” on the left (numbered 2 – 6) that do all sorts of things.  Let me tell you what each of these are and then come back and explain how to use/interpret these things.

2. This is a parameter that can be used to change the sample file

3. This is the link to the sample file that was selected originally (I selected the first file in the folder and this is the link to that file).

4. This is the “by example query” – the most important query to know about.

5. This is an auto generated function that goes with 4 above.

6. This is the final output query (it is the query that is displayed in 1 above).

Matt clearly explains the whole process, so read on if you need to combine files of Power Query.

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Formula.Firewall In Power Query

Chris Webb explains when you might get a Formula.Firewall error in Power BI or Power Query:

The important difference here is that there is now one step in this query instead of two: the query and the filtering take place in the same step. Even more importantly, regardless of the data privacy settings, the query fails with the error:

Formula.Firewall: Query ‘DimDate With Native Query Single Step Fails’ (step ‘Source’) references other queries or steps, so it may not directly access a data source. Please rebuild this data combination.

The problem here is that the Power Query engine is not allowed to access two different data sources originating from different queries in the same step – as far as I understand it this is because it makes it too hard for the engine to work out whether a step connects to a data source or not, and so which data privacy rules should be applied.

This is an interesting downside to putting in complex data privacy rules.

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Bundling Measures Together

Philip Seamark shows how to bundle measures together in Power BI so they all appear at the top of the Fields section:

I’m going to share in this blog a technique I’ve found useful in Power BI for collecting measures together in once place AND placing them at the top of the field list.

The good news is, calculated measures do not have to exist on the table that stores the underlying data specific to that measure.  Measures can be placed on any table in the model and they will still work as expected.  This may not be immediately obvious but it’s handy to know.

So far, I’ve kept measures on their logical best-fit tables, but Philip’s hint looks quite useful once the set of measures grows, or if there are a number of cross-table measures.

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Power BI Supports Interactive R Visuals

David Smith reports on a great update to Power BI:

The above chart was created with the plotly package, but you can also use htmlwidgets or any other R package that creates interactive graphics. The only restriction is that the output must be HTML, which can then be embedded into the Power BI dashboard or report. You can also publish reports including these interactive charts to the online Power BI service to share with others. (In this case though, you’re restricted to those R packages supported in Power BI online.)

Power BI now provides four custom interactive R charts, available as add-ins:

I’d avoided doing too much with R visuals in Power BI because the output was so discordant—Power BI dashboards are often lively things, but the R visual would just sit there, limp and lifeless.  I’m glad to see that this has changed.

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Rotating Tiles Custom Visual

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Rotating Tile Custom Visual.  The Rotating Tile gives you the ability to display multiple metrics on a single visual that rotates through each value you wish to display.  This allows you to save valuable space on your reports!

This feels like the type of thing that works on a dashboard but would get frustrating if you used it for time-sensitive data or data which required thoughtful analysis.

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Power BI Report Server Released

Ginger Grant notes that Power BI Report Server is now generally available:

The most glaring change from what was announced earlier, is Power BI Report Server can only connect to analysis services data sources, both tabular and multidimensional.  If you want to connect to SQL Server, Oracle or Excel or all three, use the Power BI Web Service.  Only going to the cloud version will users be able to create a data mashup or connect to anything but SQL Server.

Connecting to one data source is not what was promised when the Power BI Report Server was announced in May.  Various Power BI Product members held a session at the Microsoft Data Summit where attendees were able to ask questions.  I asked “When are we going to be able to use Power BI Report Server with data sources other than analysis services?”  In a room full of people, I was assured that it was a top priority of the team to release the same data connectivity functionality for Power BI Report Server that currently exists for Power BI Services and the current plan was to release this functionality the next release.

This is the most glaring flaw with Power BI Report Server at the moment.  Unfortunately, that probably makes it DOA for my purposes, at least until they introduce SQL Server relational as a valid data source.

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Planning A Power BI Enterprise Deployment

Melissa Coates announces a new whitepaper co-authored with Chris Webb:

I’m excited to share that a new technical whitepaper I co-authored with Chris Webb is published. It’s called Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment. It was really a fun experience to write something a bit more formal than blog posts. My interest in Power BI lies in how to successfully deploy it, manage it, and what the end-to-end story is especially from the perspective of integration with other data assets in an organization. Power BI has grown to be a huge, wide set of features so we got a little verbose at just over 100 pages.

It is a beefy whitepaper.  I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it’s now on my list.

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Power BI Premium Released

Dustin Ryan reports that Power BI Premium is now generally available:

Microsoft stated that Power BI Premium would be GA late Q2 of 2017, which could mean nothing else aside from June. Well, today is the day that Power BI Premium, along with Power BI Report Server, are generally available.

Lucky for me, I have a user on a tenant with Power BI Premium capacity available for me to use. When you first log into your tenant after Power BI Premium capacity has been purchased, you are presented with the following welcome screen which includes a link to learn more about Premium capacity.

The Power BI team continues to be busy.

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Allowing Native Queries In An M Project

Cedric Charlier ran into an error running native queries in his Visual Studio M project:

I was just using it since a few days when I found an interesting case. My query had a native query

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Sql.Database(
   “server”,
   “db”,
   [Query = “select * from myTable where field=” & value]
)

When I tried to execute it, I received a message from the Power Query SDK that

The evaluation requires a permission that has not been provided. Data source kind: ‘SQL’. Permission kind: ‘NativeQuery’.

Read on for the solution.

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