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Category: Power BI

Visualizing Checkins

Published 2016-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2016-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

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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Dashboards Or Reports

Published 2016-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad compares dashboards to reports:

Dashboard: General

Stephen Few‘s definition of Dashboard: A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.

Report: General

A Report on the other hand is any informational work. This information can be at any format. Table, Chart, text, number or anything else.

Reza then ties it back to Power BI, showing how to take advantage of both of these concepts.

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Word Cloud Visual

Published 2016-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight shows off the word cloud custom visual in Power BI:

Key Takeaways

  • Great for parsing unstructured data

  • Utilize stop words to remove commonly used filler words like a, the, an, etc…

    • You can use the default stop word that are provided and add your own that you would like to remove from the visual.

  • The size of the words in the visual tell you how frequently the word is used.

Cf. yesterday’s word cloud example.  I’m not sure how truly valuable word clouds are for visualization purposes, but at least they’re fun to peruse.

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Auditing In Power BI

Published 2016-10-11 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant shows off some of the auditing capabilities within Power BI:

As you can see by looking at the available Power BI options, there are a number of options to choose from. If you select the top item PowerBI activities, then everything gets selected. After doing that click outside of the menu for the menu to go away. Select a date and time range of your choosing, select specific users if you wish, then click on the Search button. Depending on how big your date range is, this may take some time to load. Once you see the results, you have the ability to filter as well.

Another day, another two dozen new Power BI features…  This one’s a good one.

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Generating JSON In Power BI

Published 2016-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to generate JSON in M:

Often, when calling web services from Power BI or Power Query, you’ll need to generate some JSON inside your query to send to these web services. The M language makes this relatively easy to do with the Json.FromValue() function but there’s only one example of how to use it in the help so I though it might be useful to provide some worked examples of M data types and how Json.FromValue() turns them into JSON.

First, here’s a function – that I’ve called GetJson() for the examples here – that takes a parameter of any data type, passes it to Json.FromValue() and returns the JSON representation of the input as text:

Read on for the code sample.

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