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Category: Power BI

Power BI Themes

Published 2017-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Gogula Aralingam notes that Power BI can now support basic skinning:

The March 2017 update of Power BI Desktop comes with a preview of Themes. Right now it is in its simplest of forms: You manually create a JSON file that has a very few attributes that can set basic color themes to your reports. So all you have to do is create file that looks like this:

Click through for an example.  This isn’t a true fix for the lack of Color Vision Deficiency support, but you can plug in safe colors (for example, this article includes some) and skirt the issue until there’s real support.

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Using DAX For Dynamic Grouping

Published 2017-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Thomas shows how to include an “All Others” member in a Power BI visual:

Requirement: The user wants a report with a column chart. The X axis will have Subcategory Name and the value will be the sum of Internet Sales. Along with this chart, the user will have a slicer where they can select the Subcategory Names. The column chart should “update” showing one column for each selected subcategory, and another column named “Others” with the summed amount of the rest of the unselected categories.

Basically, they wanted a dynamic group called “Others” and the members within this group should change based on what is selected on the slicer.

This would be a good time to show a visual representation of what the requirement means.

Click through for that visualization, as well as the solution.

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Getting M Code From Power Query

Published 2017-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows that you can copy a query and paste into Notepad to get the M code for that query:

Two years ago I blogged about a method to export all the M code for all of your queries in Power Query using the Send A Frown button – useful if you need the code for documentation purposes. This trick doesn’t work with Power BI Desktop, unfortunately, but the good news is that there’s a better way to do this now in Power Query and Power BI Desktop using copy/paste. It’s pretty simple really: when you copy a query from the Power Query or Power BI Desktop Query Editor you can not only paste the query to another Query Editor (pasting from Power Query to Power BI and vice versa works too) but you can also paste the query to a text editor like Notepad and get the M code for the query.

Read on for more.

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Waffle Charts

Published 2017-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series with the waffle chart:

In this module you will learn how to use the Waffle Chart Power BI Custom Visual.  The Waffle Chart visual is most useful for presenting a percentage of data. This chart is a great option to choose over other visuals like Pie Charts, which are not great at showing proportions of data.

Waffle charts are infographic-friendly visuals; they’re easy to read and as long as you don’t have too many categories, easy to compare.

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Power BI Quick Calc

Published 2017-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Nicolo Grando talks about a couple of Power BI features, conditional formatting and Quick Calc:

If you select a text column you can:

  • Show only the first attribute
  • show only the last attribute
  • Count the attribute
  • Distinct count the attribute

If you select a numeric column you can:

  • Sum of value

  • find the minimum or maximum value

  • Average the value of column

  • standard deviation of value

  • Count the value

  • Distinct count of value

  • Variance fo value

  • Median of value

The screenshots are in Italian, but it’s pretty easy to get the context behind them.

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More Dynamically Changing Shapes In Power BI

Published 2017-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck has a follow-up post regarding dynamic shape changing in Power BI:

Yesterday I published the blog post Dynamically Changing Shapes in Power BI, which seemed to be quite popular in social media. It showed a lot of people were struggling with this issue and that some people had also found (alternative) solutions for it. In the comments of that blog post, you can find a solution proposed by Jason Thomas (blog | twitter). Jason has quite the Power BI & SSRS knowledge and he has found a cool trick to solve our changing images problem. In this blog post, I’m going to explain the solution step-by-step.

Click through to see the solution.

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Finding Disproportionate Outliers With DAX

Published 2017-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie uses DAX to find disproportionate sentiment on a per-group basis:

My wife loves to travel AND she loves data, so it’s no surprise that she showed me the infographic in question.

“Oh come on, California residents don’t visit the Philippines more often than any other country.”  That was my first reaction.  (Mexico is the overwhelming #1 destination, basically for every state… because Cancun.  And because there are so many Mexican-Americans).

“Ah…  but California residents DO visit the Philippines disproportionately more often than they ‘should,’ according to national averages!”  That was my dawning second realization (and confirmed by the fine print of the Orbitz article, even though the article’s title suggests otherwise.)

So, how do we do that in DAX?  Pretty simply, actually.

I’m mentally working out whether this could be useful in anomaly detection.

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