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Category: Power BI

Making Cortana Work

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.

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SSRS + Power BI Desktop

Andrew Peterson walks through the steps to check out the SSRS 2016 preview which supports Power BI Desktop:

SSRS 2016 supporting Power BI Desktop reports is now in preview on Azure. But for many of us, we’d rather be able to review this in our own virtual environment, and more specifically – VirtualBox. We’ll now you can.

Our starting point was a blog posting my Microsoft employee Christopher Finlan outlining the steps needed to setup this preview in a Hyper-V environment. A great start, but what we wanted was the ability to run it Virtual Box. Fortunately for us, running the downloaded VHD in VirtualBox is much easier than Hyper-V.

Click through for the instructions.

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Power BI Streaming Datasets

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.

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Globe Map Visual

Devin Knight has part 24 of his custom visuals series:

  • The Globe Map is a 3D globe visualization.

  • It looks similar to the technology Power Map in Excel but lacks a few features like animating the data across time.

  • The map can have multiple data visualization layers on top of the map like a bar chart and a heat map.

Under the right circumstances, this can be a useful visualization.  I think its benefit is mostly limited to the “wow, this looks cool” effect.

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Grouping And Binning

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.

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Visualizing Checkins

Rob Sewell uses Power BI to map where he’s been:

I am using the swarm API but the principle is the same for any other API that provides you with data. For example, I used the same principles to create the embedded reports on the PASS PowerShell Virtual Chapter page showing the status of the cards suggesting improvements to the sqlserver module for the product team to work on. Hopefully, this post will give you some ideas to work on and show you that it is quite easy to get excellent data visualisation from APIs

First up we need to get the data. I took a look at the Swarm developers page ( The Trello ishere by the way) I had to register for an app, which gave me a client id and a secret. I then followed the steps here to get my user token I was only interested in my own check ins so I used the steps under Token flow Client applications to get my access token which I used in an URL like this.

This post includes some Powershell and quite a few animated GIFs, making it easy to follow.

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On-Prem Power BI

Koen Verbeeck looks at the preview of Power BI integration inside Reporting Services:

  • one thing that I am missing, is when you are rendering the report that there is an “edit report” button that takes you to Power BI Desktop. A bit like in PowerBI.com, where you can also go to edit mode if you have the correct permissions.

  • by the way, if you truly want to test it locally, you can download the .vhd file (the virtual hard disk) and run it in your own HyperV environment.

All in all it looks very nice for a first preview. Currently only SSAS is supported and custom visualizations are not, but I guess the SSRS team will surprise us with more features soon. Great job SSRS team!

Lots of interesting thoughts here, so check it out.

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Excel To Power BI

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.

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Power BI Integrates With SSRS

Paul Turley discusses a brand new announcement:

What am I most excited about as I prepare for the PASS Summit here in Seattle this week?  A lot of things.  Preparing for my session, which will be on Thursday at 1:30, by far the most popular and interesting topics are about integration and tool choice.  Today’s public announcement on the SSRS product team blog about on-premises Power BI integration with Reporting Services is really big news.  It’s great to see two of the technologies I love working together.  Whether in the cloud or on-premises, Power BI and Reporting Services can be used together.

It’s hard to overstate how huge this is.  Plenty of companies want the reporting that Power BI offers, but have security or software policies in place which prevented Power BI adoption.  Having it render through Reporting Services means that end users don’t need to have Power BI Desktop and that the data and reports remain entirely on-prem.

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