Category: Power BI

Melissa Coates has a great checklist to help you figure out if your Power BI dashboard is done:

Auto time intelligence is enabled by default, and it applies to each individual PBIX file (there’s not a global option). For most datetime columns that exist in the dataset, a hidden date table is created in the model to support time-oriented DAX calculations. This is great functionality for newer users, or if you have a very simple data model. However, if you typically utilize a standard Date table, then you will want to disable the hidden date tables to reduce the file size. (Tip: You can view the hidden date tables if you connect to the PBIX via DAX Studio.)

There are a lot of good things to think about here.

Reza Rad covers one method of sharing Power BI content with users:

What dashboard sharing as the name of it explains is based on a dashboard. You can only share a dashboard with this method, not a report. Consider that you have a dashboard like below screenshot, and you want to share it. There is a share link at the top right corner of the dashboard.

Dashboard sharing have very few options to set and is very simple to configure. You just need to add the email address of people whom you want to share this report. You can also write a message for them to know that this report is shared with them.

Click through for more information.  Note that this is a paid feature.

Chris Webb points out a new function in Power BI:

It’s very easy to use: the first parameter takes a text value, the second parameter takes either a text value containing a single text value or a list of single characters, and it returns the text from the first parameter minus all characters that are not in the second parameter. For example, the expression:

Text.Select("Hello", "l")

…returns the text value “ll”

Click through to see an example of how you can use this to filter out punctuation and other unwanted characters.

Reza Rad explains how the Power BI gateway works:

You don’t need a gateway in all scenarios. Only if the data source is located on-premises, you need a gateway. For online or cloud-based data sources, no gateway is required. For example; if you are getting data from CRM Online, you don’t need a gateway. However, if you are getting data from SQL Server database located on your local domain server, then you need a gateway. For Azure SQL DB you don’t need a gateway. However, a SQL Server database located on Azure Virtual Machine is considered as on-premises and needs gateway.

This post could not have come at a better time for me, so I’m definitely happy to see it.

Reza Rad shows off a Power Query function which is not available in the UI:

List.Accumulate is a function that can easily save a number of steps in your Power Query transformations, instead of applying multiple steps, you can simply use List.Accumulate to overcome what you want. List.Accumulate function loops through the list and accumulate a value as a result. This function needs usually three parameters; the list itself, seed, and accumulator. Here are parameters explained in details;

• list; the list that we want to apply the transformation to it.
• seed; is an optional parameter. this is the initial value.
• accumulator; is a function. this function determines what accumulation calculation happens on items of the list. the way that this function is defined is exactly the way that you write a function in Power Query M script using Lambda expressions.

best way to learn about seed and accumulator is through some examples, let’s apply some transformations with List.Accumulate and see how these two parameters are working.

Read on to see how to use it.

Dustin Ryan has put together a Power BI template to collate results for a number of Azure Data Migration Assistant assessments:

Recently a customer reached out to me to help with the challenging task of understanding the assessment results of 61 SQL environments including over 500 databases  being considered for migrating to Azure SQL Database. Now there is already a great solution that exists for aggregating DMA assessment exports but it only works for assessment exports in .JSON format. The existing solution also requires that the assessment results be written to a SQL Server database.

So I built a solution that uses Power BI to parse the DMA assessment exports (.CSV format) and aggregate the data so it can be more effectively browsed and understood in a report.

Click through for a link to download that template, as well as additional resources.