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Category: Power BI

Query ElasticSearch Using Power BI

Published 2016-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Elton Stoneman shows how to use Power BI to read data from Elasticsearch:

Kibana is the natural UI choice for partnering Elasticsearch, and it has the advantage of being Web-based and Dockerized, so it’s cross-platform and easy to share. But PowerBI is a lot more powerful, and the multitude of available connectors mean it’s easy to build a single dashboard which pulls data from multiple sources.

Using Elasticsearch for one of those sources is simple, although it will need some custom work to query your indexes and navigate the documents to get the field you want. You can even publish your reports to PowerBI in the cloud and limit access using Azure Active Directory – which gives you a nice, integrated security story.

I tend to be very hard on Kibana, particularly because it makes the easy stuff easy and the hard stuff impossible, so I think that this is an interesting alternative to Kibana.

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Power BI + Interactive R Charts

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati shows us how to integrate R charts in the Power BI experience:

In previous videos you’ve learned that we can demonstrate R visualization in Power BI, In this video you will learn how R visualization is working interactively with other elements in Power BI report. In fact Power BI works with R charts as a regular visualization and highlighting and selecting items in other elements of report will effect on that. Here is a quick video about this functionality

Check out the five-minute video.

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Power BI Tables Without Data Sources

Published 2016-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Tying Meetup To Power BI

Published 2016-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Retention Analytics

Published 2016-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc shows collegiate retention data using Power BI:

Partnering with Stetson University, I am happy to share the first of many Power BI Higher Education Analytics solutions. This solution shows student persistence, retention, and graduation patterns, leveraging BANNER as the data source. Year-over-over retention and graduation rates can be filtered to allow deeper examination of trends at the college and major level. Additional views, including retention and graduation rate tables by major and ethnicity, are included within the report solution.  The entire solution with documentation can be downloaded here.

The following image shows the first view within the report: overall persistence, retention, and graduation rates by year of first time student cohort. This report allows users to quickly show institutional retention and graduation trends across time, with the option to filter the view to show only specific colleges and/or majors.

This also serves as a Power BI demo, in case you’re hurting for good examples.

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Power BI Custom Visuals Course

Published 2016-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight is starting a free course on custom visuals in Power BI:

Welcome to an exciting new FREE class that I am launching today!  Over the next year (that’s right year!) I will be releasing one module a week detailing how to work with all of the Power BI visuals available in the Custom Visuals Gallery.  You might ask why am I doing this?  Well The Microsoft Power BI team and the Power BI Community, through the Custom Visuals Gallery, have expanded the data visualization capabilities of Power BI drastically but unfortunately has provided little and in some cases no direction on how to use these the new features.  These Custom Visuals are designed by Microsoft on occasion but more often then not the Power BI Community has put in a lot of hard work to provide these great new features for everyone to use.  My thought is if the Power BI Community is willing to design and publish these without asking individuals for payment then I would love to provide training on these features to you for free as well.

This sounds like a nice course.  Good on Devin for doing this.

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Bidirectional Cross-Filtering And M

Published 2016-05-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to create a report with with a single slicer that allows the ability to show data for the current day, week, month, and year:

The way to achieve this is not all that different from the calculated column approach, but it requires a separate table to model the many-to-many relationship between all the required relative period selections and the dates in them, as well as the use of bidirectional cross-filtering between tables (which I blogged about here). The data model I used for this report looks like this

Be sure to read the comments to make sure you don’t get into a scenario in which a user can select multiple periods and get duplicated data.

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