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Category: Power BI

Radar Charts

Published 2016-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his custom visuals course:

In this module you will learn how to use the Radar Chart, a Power BI Custom Visual. The Radar Chart is sometimes is also know to some as a web chart, spider chart, or star chart.  Using the Radar Chart allows you to display multiple categories of data on each spoke (like spokes on a bicycle wheel) of the chart. The Radar Chart does support the display of multiple metrics, which allows you to compare and contrast the “pull” that each category has on your metrics.

I still say you should stick with the fish chart for all of your visualization needs.

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Handling Division Failure

Published 2016-06-21 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks at how division can go wrong in Power Query:

In this example I just returned zero if I find error. but you can return error message if you like with [Revenue Per Item][ErrorMessage]. This method is great error handling method when an error out of blue happens in your data set. I always recommend using TRY method to get rid of errors that might stop the whole solution to work properly.

I have to mention that steps above are separated to show you how the output of try expression looks like. In fact you can combine both steps above in single step with TRY OTHERWISE as below (Thanks to Maxim Zelensky for pointing this out);

The end result is code which is a bit more complex, but safely handles a number of edge cases.

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Hexbin Scatterplot

Published 2016-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his Power BI visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Hexbin Scatterplot Power BI Custom Visual.  The Hexbin Scatterplot is a variation of the traditional Scatter Chart but instead of using bubble size it relies on color saturation and hexbins to show value distribution.  You should consider using this chart when you’re more interested in visualizing density instead of individuals points themselves.

This is worth checking out.

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Using Diagnostics Trace With Power BI

Published 2016-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb uses Diagnostics.Trace to track process runtime in Power BI:

To sum up, the workflow for tuning your query is:

  • Make some changes to the LongQuery query that hopefully make it faster

  • Update the Trace Message parameter with some notes about which version of the LongQuery query it is that you’ll be testing

  • Click the Refresh Preview button for the Diagnostics query to test how long LongQuery now runs for

  • Refresh, or load, the query that reads the data from the trace logs so you can see how all of your changes have affected query execution times

I give it two months before the Power BI team releases a change to make this easier…

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Power BI Groups

Published 2016-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks at using Power BI groups and integrating with Office 365:

When you share a content with an individual in the organization, if that person leave the company, or be replaced by someone else from another team, then you have to remove sharing from previous user account, and assign it to the new user account. Best practice is to share content with groups. and members of Groups then easily can be managed by an administrator. Power BI groups are fully synchronized with Office 365 groups. once you used a group in Power BI, then it is only an admin’s task to add/remove members from it.

I like this group-based approach a lot, as it makes dashboard security a lot easier.

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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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