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Category: Power BI

Power BI Matrix Preview

Published 2017-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington reports that Power BI Desktop supports a new type of matrix (in preview):

Expand, Collapse, Drill and Filter

Expand and collapse behaves just like a pivot table however with a slightly different UI. The new matrix experience is however entirely consistent with the chart drill experience so it is very intuitive.

The new cross filter behaviour is of course not possible in a regular pivot table in Excel (without VBA). You can select any column, row or cell in the matrix and it will cross drill the other visuals on the canvas as can be seen above.

This looks like an interesting change, and Matt shows how to enable the preview.

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Power BI Security Updates

Published 2017-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant notes that there have been some big changes to Power BI security:

People who have been granted Power BI administrator rights will also notice a modification to the Admin screen. The March 2017 update to Power BI provides a major change to the security model in Power BI. Previously all the security settings were set at the Tenant Level, meaning that all the privileges were granted to all users. If I wanted to allow one group within the organization to be able to publish reports to the web, but I did not want to allow everyone to publish reports to the web, there was no way that this could be accomplished. All that has changed. It is now possible to include or exclude groups of users from having rights in Power BI. Users can be classified into security groups in Azure Active Directory, either through the Office 365 Admin Center or via the Azure AD Admin Center. Once created the security groups can be used in Power BI. Security Groups are not the same thing as the groups created in Power BI when a new work group is created.

Read the whole thing.

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Getting Familiar With Shape Maps

Published 2017-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how to generate a shape map in Power BI:

I have previously written some blog posts about Map visuals in Power BI. One of them was specifically about Filled Map, titled as Filled Map; the Good, the Bad, the Ugly! Why? you need to read that post to find the reason. In this post I want to explain the power of Shape Map which is one of the visuals Power BI team published recently. This visual is still at preview mode at the time of writing this post. This visual is much more powerful than what it looks. The actual power behind it is that you can have your own map added to it. Let’s take a closer look at this visual with an example. If you want to learn more about Power BI; read Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star.

It’s an interesting look at a new visual.

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Power BI Themes

Published 2017-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Gogula Aralingam notes that Power BI can now support basic skinning:

The March 2017 update of Power BI Desktop comes with a preview of Themes. Right now it is in its simplest of forms: You manually create a JSON file that has a very few attributes that can set basic color themes to your reports. So all you have to do is create file that looks like this:

Click through for an example.  This isn’t a true fix for the lack of Color Vision Deficiency support, but you can plug in safe colors (for example, this article includes some) and skirt the issue until there’s real support.

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Using DAX For Dynamic Grouping

Published 2017-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Thomas shows how to include an “All Others” member in a Power BI visual:

Requirement: The user wants a report with a column chart. The X axis will have Subcategory Name and the value will be the sum of Internet Sales. Along with this chart, the user will have a slicer where they can select the Subcategory Names. The column chart should “update” showing one column for each selected subcategory, and another column named “Others” with the summed amount of the rest of the unselected categories.

Basically, they wanted a dynamic group called “Others” and the members within this group should change based on what is selected on the slicer.

This would be a good time to show a visual representation of what the requirement means.

Click through for that visualization, as well as the solution.

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Getting M Code From Power Query

Published 2017-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows that you can copy a query and paste into Notepad to get the M code for that query:

Two years ago I blogged about a method to export all the M code for all of your queries in Power Query using the Send A Frown button – useful if you need the code for documentation purposes. This trick doesn’t work with Power BI Desktop, unfortunately, but the good news is that there’s a better way to do this now in Power Query and Power BI Desktop using copy/paste. It’s pretty simple really: when you copy a query from the Power Query or Power BI Desktop Query Editor you can not only paste the query to another Query Editor (pasting from Power Query to Power BI and vice versa works too) but you can also paste the query to a text editor like Notepad and get the M code for the query.

Read on for more.

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