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Category: Power BI

Ignoring Case In Table.Distinct With Power Query

Published 2018-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Cedric Charlier shows how to ignore case when running Table.Distinct in Power Query:

Note that at the top of the table, I’ve twice the value ADO.NET, once with uppercase and once lowercase for the “Net” part. If I try to apply a Table.Distinct, the two values will be considered as distinct and one of them won’t be removed.

Will it be an issue? If this your key and it’s part of a model where this key is part of one side of a one-to-many then it will be an issue.

Read on for the solution.

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All About Power BI Licensing

Published 2018-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has a guide for the perplexed when it comes to licensing Power BI:

The pricing table above may scare you off and you may immediately think of not going through the embedded path. However, I need to let you know that there are some scenarios which Power BI Embedded can be a much more cost-effective option than Pro. Here is an example:

Assume that you have 100 users for your Power BI solution. And your users are not connecting all at the same time to use Power BI reports. You may have the maximum of 300 page renders per hour for them if you use embedded. In such case, embedded for that scenario would cost you about $700 USD per month, where the Power BI Pro for 100 users would be $1000 USD per month. This means saving of $3,600 USD per year. This is an example scenario that Power BI Embedded can be more cost-effective than Pro.

Give this a careful reading if you’re looking to implement Power BI in your environment.

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Adding KPI Indicators To Power BI

Published 2018-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley goes on a rant:

Makes perfect sense, right?  This is a basic use case and a good application for simple KPIs; with the one minor caveat that POWER BI DOESN’T SUPPORT THIS!

This topic has become a bit of a soapbox topic for me because it’s a capability that, in my opinion, is a very obvious gap in the Power BI feature set.  After unleashing my rant, I’ll demonstrate a solution a little further down in this post.

Both the rant and the workaround are interesting enough to read, so check them out.

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Showing Dataset Parameters In Power BI Reports

Published 2018-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser shows how to display the parameters selected for a Power BI report on the report itself:

Dataset Parameters are a way to bring some sort of dynamic into your Power Query datamodelling in Power BI. For my blog post about  Modifying Parameter values in powerbi.com  I was looking for a way to display the value of a parameter inside a Power BI report.

In this blog post I would like to show you the steps that are required to bring your parameters to your field list  – and as a consequence – into your Power BI report.

Read on to see how to do this.

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Time Zone Conversion With M

Published 2018-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Cedric Charlier shows how to perform time zone conversions with the M language in Power Query:

Everything is fine … except if I share my code with someone from another time zone. The function DateTimeZone.ToLocal is relying on regional settings and in that case my conversion should always be from UTC to “Brussels time”.

I didn’t find any other way to ensure that I’m always converting from UTC to “Brussels time” than implementing the conversion by myself. That’s the goal of the following function

Looks like there may not be a nice “convert to a different time zone” here like lubridate::with_tz() does in R.

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Sharing Power BI Content Via E-Mail

Published 2018-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Hughes looks at the security implications of being able to share Power BI reports through e-mail:

My account does not have Power BI Pro, but now I can try it for free for 60 days and get access to the data while I am on the trial. I clicked both options, because I can. The Upgrade account option would require me to pay for Pro. However, Try Pro for free works and I was able to access the report fully. I have successfully shared my corporate content with a personal user.

Steve shows us where you can go to disable this if you want, as well as places where you can see what content has been shared.

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Finding Where Power BI Local Credentials Get Stored

Published 2018-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger hunts down where those local Power BI credentials live:

With SSIS, you have to be careful to export the SSIS files without any sensitive information included. But what about Power BI? If you save the .PBIX files on OneDrive, can you be exposing yourself to a security risk?

Looking at things, it looks like credentials for data sources are stored globally, so one wouldn’t expect them to be in the .pbix files.

Read on as he does some more sleuthing and discovers the answer.

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Speeding Up Power BI Aggregations With Primary Keys

Published 2018-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has an interesting use case for adding primary keys on lookup tables:

As you can see, the Property Type column from the #”Price Paid” query contains single letter codes describing the type of property sold in each transaction; the Property Type column from #“Property Types” contains a distinct list of the same codes and acts as a dimension table. Again there’s nothing interesting going on in this query.

The problems start when you try to join data from these two queries using a Merge and then, for each row in #”Property Types”, show the sum of the Price Paid column from #”Price Paid”.

Although baseline performance is bad, Chris shows a way of improving that performance significantly.

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Exploratory Analysis With Hockey Data In Power BI

Published 2018-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Stacia Varga digs into her hockey data set a bit more:

Once I know whether a variable is numerical or categorical, I can compute statistics appropriately. I’ll be delving into additional types of statistics later, but the very first, simplest statistics that I want to review are:

  • Counts for a categorical variable
  • Minimum and maximum values in addition to mean and median for a numerical value

To handle my initial analysis of the categorical variables, I can add new measures to the modelto compute the count using a DAX formula like this, since each row in the games table is unique:

Game Count = countrows(games)

It’s interesting seeing Stacia use Power BI for exploratory analysis.  My personal preference would definitely be to dump the data into R, but there’s more than one way to analyze a data set.

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Highlighting Scatter Charts In Power BI

Published 2018-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Thomas has a great post showing how to implement highlighting of scatter/bubble charts in Power BI:

That said, there is one feature from my previous blog that was not implemented in Power BI – highlighting scatter/bubble charts. In Power BI, the scatter charts are not considered as area charts and hence you can only filter them and not highlight. This feature is useful when you have a lot of data points in your scatter chart and you want to see where a particular data point is with respect to the other data points. That said, you can make use of some nifty DAX and replicate the same behavior.

There are several steps to the process so it’s not point-and-click easy, but Jason has a nice walkthrough showing how to set it up.

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