Category: Power BI

Rob Sewell shows how to integrate Cortana with dbareports via Power BI:

When you start using Cortana to query your data you will find that at times it is very frustrating. My wife was in fits of giggles listening to me trying to record the video below as Cortana refused to understand that I was saying “servers” and repeatedly searched Bing for “service” Whilst you can negate the effect by using the alternate names for the Q and A settings it is still a bit hit and miss at times.

This is an interesting post.

Chris Webb shows how to use Streaming Datasets functionality in Power BI:

This query does the following:

• Reads the data from the Sales table in the workbook

• Converts the data to JSON (for some background on how it does this, see here)

• Sends the data to the streaming dataset using Web.Contents() to make a POST request. See this post on how to make POST requests using Web.Contents() and this post on the technique I’m using to handle HTTP errors manually.

• Returns a table containing a message saying whether the data was updated successfully or not, and the time of execution like so:

There are some limitations on what’s available now, but getting streaming data out to Power BI can make a near-real-time dashboard possible.

Reza Rad discusses a couple new additions to Power BI, grouping and binning:

Binning is grouping a numeric field based on a division. This type of grouping is called Banding as well. For example you might have customers with different yearlyIncome range from $10,000 to $100,000 and you want to create a banding by $25,000. This will generate 4 groups of yearly income for you. This is exactly what Binning in Power BI does. Let’s look at the example.

Create a Table in Power BI Report and visualize YearlyIncome (from DimCustomer), and SalesAmount (from FactInternetSales) in it. Change the aggregation of YearlyIncome from Sum to Do Not Summarize as below

You could already build this yourself, but I’m glad they introduced this, as it’s an easier solution.

Robert Sheldon shows how to import Excel data into Power BI:

We have two basic approaches for bringing Excel data into Power BI Desktop: the Get Data process and the import process. For the most part, we’ll use the Get Data process to bring in spreadsheets and use the import process to pull in the non-spreadsheet components.

Where things get a little tricky is if we have a spreadsheet table based on a query. (No doubt there are other tricky areas that I’ve yet to discover.) You can use the import process to bring in the query, in which case you have to take the extra steps of creating and populating your table, or you can use the Get Data process to bring in either the table or query. If the query exists without as associated spreadsheet table, your only option is to import the Excel file.

There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve got important Excel spreadsheets somewhere in the organization, making this a valuable article.