Category: Power BI

Reza Rad looks at how division can go wrong in Power Query:

In this example I just returned zero if I find error. but you can return error message if you like with [Revenue Per Item][ErrorMessage]. This method is great error handling method when an error out of blue happens in your data set. I always recommend using TRY method to get rid of errors that might stop the whole solution to work properly.

I have to mention that steps above are separated to show you how the output of try expression looks like. In fact you can combine both steps above in single step with TRY OTHERWISE as below (Thanks to Maxim Zelensky for pointing this out);

The end result is code which is a bit more complex, but safely handles a number of edge cases.

Reza Rad looks at using Power BI groups and integrating with Office 365:

When you share a content with an individual in the organization, if that person leave the company, or be replaced by someone else from another team, then you have to remove sharing from previous user account, and assign it to the new user account. Best practice is to share content with groups. and members of Groups then easily can be managed by an administrator. Power BI groups are fully synchronized with Office 365 groups. once you used a group in Power BI, then it is only an admin’s task to add/remove members from it.

I like this group-based approach a lot, as it makes dashboard security a lot easier.

Chris Webb shows how to create a table in Power BI’s M language without a backing data source:

No data source is needed – this is a way of defining a table value in pure M code. The first parameter of the function takes a list of column names as text values; the second parameter is a list of lists, where each list in the list contains the values on each row in the table.

In the last example the columns in the table were of the data type Any (the ABC123 icon in each column header tells you this), which means that they can contain values of any data type including numbers, text, dates or even other tables. Here’s an example of this

This is a helpful trick.

Reza Rad shows how to integrate Meetup data into Power BI:

In the documentation of this service in Meetup mentioned that Time column is:

time = UTC start time of the event, in milliseconds since the epoch

That means it is timestamp formatted. Timestamp value is number of seconds from epoch which is 1970-01-01 00:00:00. I have previously written about how to change timestamp value to date time and it is fairly easy with adding seconds to it. However for this case our value is not seconds, it is milliseconds so I have to first divide it by 1000.

This is pretty cool.  We’re starting up a Power BI meetup in the Triangle area, so it’ll be fun hosting a Power BI Meetup where we use Power BI to read Meetup data.