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Category: Power BI

Attribute Slicer

Published 2017-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Attribute Slicer Power BI Custom Visual.  Using the Attribute Slicer you have the ability to filter your entire report while also being able to visibly see a measure value associated with each attribute.

Click through for the video as well as more details.  This looks like a very interesting way of integrating a slicer with some important metric, like maybe including dollar amounts per sales region and then filtering by specific regions to show more detailed analyses.

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Consuming Live Data Vs On-Prem Gateway

Published 2017-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Gogula Aryalingam explains the difference between two Power BI features:

The question: “Why does it say ‘Consume live data sources with full interactivity’ as one feature while the other feature says ‘Access on-premise data using the Data Connectivity Gateways’, while it is obvious that if you need to connect to an on-premise data source to consume live data it has to be through a gateway?”

Okay, this is how I would explain this:

Read on for the explanation.

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Visualizing Market Basket Analyses With Power BI

Published 2017-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati explains how to use Power BI and a Force-Directed Graph custom visual to display results of a market basket analysis:

By clicking on the “R transformation” a new windows will show up. This windows is a R editor that you can past your code here. however there are couple of things that you should consider.

1. there is a error message handling but always recommended to run and be sure your code work in R studio first (in our example we already tested it in Part 1).

2. the all data is holding in variable “dataset”.

3. you do not need to write “install.packages” to get packages here, but you should first install required packages into your R editor and here just call “library(package name)”

Leila takes this step-by-step, leading to a Power BI visual with drill-down.

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Displaying Slicer Selections

Published 2017-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie shows an easy method to concatenate selected values for display in Excel and Power BI:

Measure Step 2: Dealing with No (aka All) Selections on Slicer

The original measure above is really awkward when the user has made NO selection on a slicer – because it can then return a REALLY long list!

To deal with that case, we add an IF to the measure to detect precisely that case, and then return “All.”

Read on for the code, as well as some caveats and additional hints.

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RevoScaleR With Power BI

Published 2017-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun looks at several methods for using RevoScaleR packages in a Power BI dashboard:

I was invited to deliver a session for Belgium User Group on SQL Server and R integration. After the session – which we did online using web based Citrix  – I got an interesting question: “Is it possible to use RevoScaleR performance computational functions within Power BI?“. My first answer was,  a sceptical yes. But I said, that I haven’t used it in this manner yet and that there might be some limitations.

The idea of having the scalable environment and the parallel computational package with all the predictive analytical functions in Power BI is absolutely great. But something tells me, that it will not be that straight forward.

Read on for the rest of the story.

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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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