Category: Power BI

Wolfgang Strasser shows off a new feature in Power BI:

The theme documentation provides a list of available visual names, cardNames and property names.

At this point some further explanation is needed for the hierarchy within the theme definition:

• visualName corresponds to available PBI visuals like treeMap, card, columnChart,…

• styleName (as of today I am not sure whereto this corresponds to PBI Desktop language.. :-)) maybe someone can further explain this to me

• cardName corresponds to the formatting card/option within Power BI Desktop. Attention here: the name in the theme JSON file is defined different than the User Interface name + do not forget case-sensitivity! (i.e.  general => General; categoryAxis => X-Axis, valueAxis => Y-Axis, ..). See the documentation for the rest of the mapping.

This is good news if it makes it easier for developers to write CVD-friendly reports.

Chris Albrektson has updated his hurricane tracker to watch Irma:

Here’s a (SQL) to the Power BI Hurricane tracker that I did last year for Hurricane Matthew. It’s not 100% perfect but it gets the job done. It should update every couple of hours, enjoy. Stay safe my fellow Floridians.

Click here to see the live report

Check it out.

Dustin Ryan shows off drillthrough actions in Power BI:

At some point this weekend, the Microsoft Power BI folks turned on the drillthrough feature in the Power BI service. This is the same drillthrough feature that demonstrated during day 1 of the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, which you can read about here. So I thought it’d be good to quickly walk through how you can set up the drill through action.

First, navigate to a report that you’ve already published to the Power BI service. This report will become the target of your drill-through action. Start editing the report and you’ll notice that on the right side there is a Drillthrough Filters section.

Read on for more.  At the moment, this is only available within the Power BI service, not in Desktop.

Kerry Tyler has an interesting use of Excel:

Fortunately, there are some tools built right into Excel that make this a whole lot easier than scrolling through the list in your browser. Armed with nothing more than the URL to the CU’s KB article and Excel 2016 (or a few older versions) quick work can be made of generating custom filters for this data.

Here are the steps:

The same Power Query bits are available in Power BI, so check it out.

Reza Rad has released part 1 of a series on creating date dimensions in Power BI:

When it comes to create the date (or calendar) dimension in Power BI, there is always a question: Should I create the dimension with Power Query or DAX? This is a very good question to ask. It means that you know that there are multiple ways of creating it. What is the difference? the answer is that for many scenarios these are similar. So, it might not be different to use Power Query or DAX for it. However, there is a big difference.

Power Query can fetch data from live web APIs. This functionality gives you the power to fetch public holidays live from an API. You cannot do this with DAX! Apart from this big difference, majority of other requirements can be done with both, you can write calculations in both M or DAX to get calendar columns as well as fiscal columns. In many scenarios public holidays plays an important role in analyzing data. You would like to know how the sales was in holidays compared to other holidays and etc.

There are a few more parts forthcoming, so stay tuned.