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Category: Power BI

Sharing Power Query Queries

Published 2016-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to use Azure Data Catalog to share queries from Power Query:

While I’m really happy to have this functionality back, and I think a lot of people will find it useful, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Some thoughts:

  • This really needs to extended to work with Power BI Desktop too. In fact, it’s such an obvious thing to do it must be happening soon…?

Given how quickly the Power BI team iterates, that’s probably the case.  Anyhow, read the whole thing.

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Power BI Synoptic Panel

Published 2016-11-30 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight’s series on Power BI visuals continues with the synoptic panel:

  • The Synoptic Panel allows you connect areas in an image with attributes in your data model.

  • Using the Synoptic Designer you can convert an image that you have to one that is compatible with plotting out data points on it.

  • You can fill each area with a color or a saturation of a color.

The Synoptic Panel is definitely a more advanced visual, but it’s very powerful.

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Controlling Power BI Interactions

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how to control what happens when you interact with a Power BI visual:

This behavior also can be set to None. For example let’s say you want to have a total of sales amount regardless of gender selection, and then a total of sales amount for the selected gender in slicer. To do this copy the SalesAmount Card Visual, and then click on Gender Slicer. click on Edit Interaction, and set one of the card visuals to None, the other one as default with Filter.

Count me among the people who did not know about this.

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Downloading Power BI Reports

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant notes that it is now possible to download Power BI reports as PBIX files:

Now that anyone can use a report which has been uploaded to the service as a starting point for a new report, there may be a decreased use of the template feature. Any report created on the desktop can be saved as a template, by selecting save on a desktop report file and changing the file type to a template. Unfortunately, templates do not contain links to the datasource used. The person creating the report must determine what data to use and if there was a dataset presently used which is refreshing the data, or create a dataset and it’s respective refresh features as part of creating a report.  Content packs provide the connections to datasets, but since the reports cannot be saved as a file for versioning, this feature is not often used instead of templates. Downloading the file and then modifying it is does resolve the issue as the starting point is then a working report with a connection to an existing dataset.

Read the whole thing.

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Numeric Ranges In Power Query

Published 2016-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb solves one form of the gaps and islands problem in Power Query:

In a comment on my post on Creating Sequences of Integers And Characters In Power BI/Power Query Lists a reader, Paul G, asked me the following question:

can you reverse this? e.g i have a list (1,2,3,5,7,8,9,12,13,14,15) can i convert this to (1-3, 5 ,7-9,12-15)

This got me thinking… I was sure it could be done in M, but would it be possible using just the UI? As far as I can see, it isn’t – there’s one crucial thing I can’t do – but I would be interested to see if anyone else can come up with a no-code solution.

Check out the comments for other attempts at solving the problem with as little code as possible.

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Viewing Power BI Audit Logs

Published 2016-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant shows how to give a Power BI Administrator rights to view the audit logs:

The Audit Logs are the third menu item in the Power BI Admin Portal. As you can tell by looking at a copy of the screen below, Audit Logs are not really part of Power BI. Yes the ability to log all of the content in Power BI exists in the Audit Logs, but so does the ability to review the audit logs for things like Exchange Mailbox Activities and User Administration Activities.

If the Office 365 Administrator has granted a user Power BI Administration rights, this is what the newly minted Power BI Administrator will see when trying to access any search activities. It appears that you the user has rights, until that user tries to do anything on the screen. At that point, this error window appears.

Click through to see how to grant audit log access.

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Timeline Visual

Published 2016-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight looks at a new Power BI custom visual:

  • The Timeline is similar to the native slicer in Power BI but has several more customizations available.

  • Not surprising, this visual can only accept date values.

  • If you need to adjust the start date of the Timeline based on your works Fiscal Calendar that is possible in the format settings.

This is a pretty nice visual, but when I tried to use it, I remember it feeling a little limiting, particularly around drilling into date slices.

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R Visuals In Power BI

Published 2016-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant discusses how to display R visuals in Power BI:

I hope that some day that this list becomes much longer, but it is a good start. If your company has lots R visuals and you wish to migrate them to Power BI, chances are some of the libraries you are using are not here. If you are interested in having your library added to the list of 352, go to the Ideas page of Power BI and request that your library be added, as Microsoft I know looks at this page to determine what to release in the future. Someone has requested that igraph be added, and since it hasn’t received a lot of votes yet (hint) it is probably low on the priority list.

Even so, this list does cover a lot of the most commonly used packages.

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Power BI Admin Portal

Published 2016-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates looks at the Power BI tenant settings in the admin portal:

Keep in mind that these selections apply to all users across the entire tenant. At this time we can’t control them by groups or anything of that nature.

In addition to the above settings for controlling user experience, the Admin Portal is also the place for viewing usage metrics which are helpful for determining who runs what how often (it’s not everything we could possibly want to know, but it’s a good start). The other two options, manage users and audit logs, redirect you over to the Office 365 Admin Center.

Another week, another few dozen Power BI additions…

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Query Folding In Power Query

Published 2016-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad discusses the performance implications of query folding in M:

I can’t start talking about the issue without explaining what Query Folding is, so let’s start with that. Query Folding means translating Power Query (M) transformations into native query language of the data source (for example T-SQL). In other words; when you run Power Query script on top of a SQL Server database, query folding will translate the M script into T-SQL statements, and fetch the final results.

Click through for more details.  The advice here sounds pretty similar to what we get for optimizing Integration Services:  push as much of the heavy lifting onto well-optimized source queries as possible, particularly when it comes to filtering out rows.

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