Category: Power BI

Stacia Varga shows how to use Power BI to simplify data analysis, using the example of New Year’s resolution goals:

First, the actual data represents the accumulation of data by day from the beginning of the year, whereas the target data represents the final tally at the end of a defined period. Each goal has a different frequency: daily, quarterly, and weekly. Currently, the comparison between actual and target data makes it appear that I’m falling way short of my goals. However, even if I were making solid progress on my goals on a daily basis, the comparison of the two values will never meet until the end of the defined period for any given goal. I need a way to prorate the target data so that I can more reasonably measure my progress.

Second, displaying the actual and target values in a table requires me to do mental math to determine how close (or not) I am to achieving my goals. Now, I’m pretty good at mental math, but a better way to see progress is to use data visualizations. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying… A picture is worth a thousand words.

This is a great post if you’re interested in getting started with Power BI.

Jason Thomas has a great introduction to PowerApps:

you will be able to pass context aware data to a PowerApps app which updates in real time as you make changes to your report. Now, your users can derive business insights and take actions from right within their Power BI reports and dashboards. No need to switch tabs to open the separate apps, copy paste data from one window to another or worry about fat fingering the wrong customer id or invoice amount.

If you think about it, this is a game changer – you finally have a BI tool that allows you to collaborate and take actions right within the report. How many times have you looked at a report, found out an insight and wished that you could send an email to the account manager, only to forget later? Well, now you don’t have to worry about that, as I am going to show you an example of how we can collaborate by adding comments within the report (not just comments, but context aware comments, based on what you are selecting) as well as show how to send emails (to the appropriate people based on your selection).

This is an interesting concept and Jason has a detailed overview of it.

Stacia Varga uses New Year’s resolutions to motivate a Power BI tutorial:

As I was thinking about this relationship between goals and feedback, I thought Microsoft Power BI would be a great tracking tool. It’s free, so use it! In years past, I used spreadsheets or checklists in journals or OneNote, any of which is a fine way to accumulate a comprehensive list of all that a person wants to do. However, I never measured progress, thereby denying myself feedback. Consequently, I’d let myself get sidetracked during the year.

This year I promised myself I’d try a different approach and thought I’d share the process with you through a series of blog posts. Although I’m going to discuss goal-tracking from a personal point of view, you can also use the same techniques for your business-oriented goals. Either way, I hope you learn something about Power BI along the way and are inspired to do some goal-setting of your own.

It’s a good use of Power BI.

Imke Feldmann shows how to strip out duplicate characters from strings in Power BI:

Function Text.RemoveRepeatingCharacters

How to use

It takes 2 arguments: The Text/string and the Delimiter. So for our example you have to enter a space, but you can use any sign there for other use cases as well.

Click through for a quick demo.

Craig Porteous show how to cluster the Power BI Data Gateway to allow for disaster recovery:

I love PowerShell and I even wrote a module with functions to query Power BI metadata but there should always be another way to get this vital information.

The documentation I mentioned earlier points you to a PowerShell module file included in the November update. You can load this file & use the commands they provide to get information about your Gateway cluster and its members or make changes to clusters.

If it’s important enough to use, it’s important enough to include in a disaster recovery plan.

Imke Feldmann has created an M function to get the set of dates from a start date to an end date at some fixed interval in Power BI:

This function takes 3 parameters:

1. From- or Start-date
2. To- or End-date
3. A selection of ONE of these intervals: Year, Quarter, Month, Week or Day

All dates will be created at the end of the chosen interval: So if you want to analyse events with a duration for example, where you want to transform your data to show one day per (monthly) event, this function generates month-end-dates for every month within the timespan. Please not that if the To-/End-date is within a month, the last element of the list will NOT be that day, but the day of the end of that month.

The default-value for the 3rd parameter is “Day”, so if you omit the specification, the function will return a list of all days in between.

Click through for the script and some explanation of the code.

Jason Thomas shows how to embed an image into Power BI without using an image URL:

And I completely understood his concerns as I had the same issue with some of the public facing reports that I made, for eg., the US Election report that I had made 1 year back. The images for the candidates were sourced from Wikipedia and certain candidates like George Bush, Donald Trump, etc. are not displayed, because the image URLs are no longer valid.

This is where you can use my workaround to embed the images within the report by converting the images into Base64.

It’s an interesting approach when you need to solve this problem.

Matt Allington contrasts the EARLIER function with the EARLIEST function in DAX:

The EARLIER function by default refers to the row context that immediately preceded the current row context being considered.  In the examples used here there have only been 2 row contexts, the outer and the inner.  Given there are only 2, when using EARLIER within the inner row context it is always referring to the outer row context.  In this case, EARLIER and EARLIEST refer to the same outer row context.  If there are more than 2 row contexts, the EARLIER function accesses the previous row context by default (starting from the inner and moving out) and the EARLIEST function refers to the outermost row context. But did you know that EARLIER has a second optional parameter?

Read the whole thing.