Category: Power BI

Melissa Coates gives us the different forms of what an “app” is in the Power BI world:

Let’s say you just heard someone mention a Power BI app. What exactly do they mean by that? Well, it depends. The term “app” is used kind of a lot in the Power BI world. So, here’s a quick reference to help you decode the conversation. I’m going to start with the most likely options, working down to other options. Which one someone is referring to really depends on their role and their level of familiarity with the Power BI ecosystem.

Power BI App

A Power BI App is a packaged up set of content in the web-based Power BI Service. Related reports, workbooks, dashboards, and datasets are published from an App Workspace into an App for users to consume.

Power BI App Workspace

An App Workspace in the Power BI Service is where reports, workbooks, dashboards, and datasets are saved, and where data refresh schedules and other settings are defined. An App Workspace is suited to development & collaboration with coworkers (whereas My Workspace is a private area). Smaller teams might do everything they need to do within an App Workspace, whereas larger teams use an App Workspace as the collaboration area for content before it gets published to a Power BI App for consumption. You can have quite a few App Workspaces, depending on how you organize content (for instance, by subject area, by project, by department, or by type of analysis).

Click through for several other potential answers for what that user means by “app.”

Phillip Seamark goes and creates a blackjack game in Power BI:

The last of the three data-tables in the model used to control Player 1 is the ‘P1 Turn’ data-table.  This is simply a 10-row single column table with numbers 1 through 10.  The purpose of this table is to use in conjunction with a slicer that will help keep track of what turn Player 1 is up to.  A series of 5 bookmarks will be used to snapshot a slicer selected in 5 different states.  A series of bookmarks will be taken with this slicer having a different value selected which is how the game can keep track of the progress through the game.

A [P1 Card Filter] calculated measure keeps track of the selected value over the above slicer which is used as a filter on the table-visual that is used to reveal cards for Player 1.

It’s more a toy solution than an actual game, but it’s interesting to see.

Meagan Longoria has a checklist for ensuring that your Power BI reports are accessible to all users:

Tooltips

• Don’t use tooltips to convey important information. Users with motor issues and users who do not use a mouse will have difficulties accessing them.

• Do add tooltips to charts as ancillary information. It is included in the accessible Show Data table for each visual.

There’s a lot of good information here.

Marco Russo bridges a gap in moving from SQL to DAX:

The SQL language offers the following types of JOIN:

• INNER JOIN
• OUTER JOIN
• CROSS JOIN

The result of a JOIN does not depends on the presence of a relationship in the data model. You can use any column of a table in a JOIN condition.

In DAX there are two ways you can obtain a JOIN behavior. First, you can leverage existing relationships in the data model in order to query data included in different tables, just as you wrote the corresponding JOIN conditions in the DAX query. Second, you can write DAX expressions producing a result equivalent to certain types of JOIN. In any case, not all the JOIN operations available in SQL are supported in DAX.

Read on for several examples.

Philip Seamark shows how to convert month numbers into names in Power BI:

The most common solution I see offered is along the lines of a SWITCH statement that lists 12 conditions (one for each month).   This works, but can also be done using existing functions.

While DAX lacks a dedicated function to convert a number to a text version, such as DATENAME in T-SQL, we can get there in two functions using DATEVALUE wrapped in a FORMAT.

To demonstrate, I will create a simple table with 13 values (1 through 13) using the following calculated table.

1	Table = GENERATESERIES(1,13)

This creates a single column table with 13 rows.

Read on for the rest of the story.

Philip Seamark answers one of the classic gaps and islands problems with DAX:

A recent post on the Power BI community website asked if it was possible to compress a group of numbers into text that described the sequential ranges contained within the numbers. This might be a group of values such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13:  (note there are gaps) with the expected result grouping the numbers that run in a sequence together to produce text like “1-4, 7-9, 12-13”.  Essentially to identify gaps when creating the text.  This seemed like an interesting challenge and here is how I solved it using DAX.

Read on for the solution, which is conceptually very similar to the T-SQL solution but a bit different in implementation.

Adam Saxton discusses Incremental Refresh with Christian Wade:

In this video, Christian Wade joined Adam Saxton to discuss Incremental Refresh with Power BI Premium. You can use Incremental Refresh with Power BI Premium to take your dataset beyond 1GB and avoid failures such as timeouts.

Check out the video.