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Category: Power BI

Horizontal Funnel

Published 2016-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight shows off the horizontal funnel Power BI custom visual:

In this module you will learn how to use the Horizontal Funnel Power BI Custom Visual.  The Horizontal Funnel functions somewhat similar to the traditional funnel but it allows you to display a secondary measure and has a few more customizations than you would normally get. You’ll find that the Horizontal Funnel is great for displaying a flow of data.

One of the better non-sales uses of funnels I’ve seen is tracking completion rates on multi-page forms or multi-step processes.  If you see a huge drop-off at one step in the process, it might indicate a bug in the form or some incongruity with the end user’s expectation.

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Linear Gauge Custom Visual

Published 2016-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight shows off the linear gauge custom visual in Power BI:

In this module you will learn how to use the Linear Gauge Power BI Custom Visual.  The Linear Gauge would often be used to visualize a KPI. It gives you the ability to compare an actual vs target as well as showing up to two trend lines.

This can be a very useful visual.  The tricky part is that the bars aren’t scaled the same, so when your eyes want to compare bar lengths, it can get a little confusing.

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Connecting Apache Drill To Power BI

Published 2016-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Bryan Smith shows how to connect Apache Drill to Power BI:

Clicking Next takes me to the From ODBC dialog.  Here, I click on the Advanced options item, ignoring the Data Source Name (DSN) drop-down, and enter a connection string with the appropriate substitution for the host parameter:

driver={MapR Drill ODBC Driver};connectiontype=Direct;host=maprcluster-3xrrusnk-node0.westus.cloudapp.azure.com;port=31010;authenticationtype=No Authentication

Notice the connection string employs a Direct connection type, indicating that the app will speak directly to one of the nodes in the cluster (as identified by the host parameter) and not to the ZooKeeper service. ZooKeeper is in use on the cluster but is not exposed externally, given the network security group changes made during my earlier deployment.  Even if ZooKeeper were exposed, it tracks the nodes of the cluster using their internal names so that any app outside the virtual network containing the cluster would not be able to leverage the information in ZooKeeper to form a connection.  The only option that works here is the Direct connection type.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, as well as checking out the UserVoice suggestion for implementing full Apache Drill support.

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Power BI Alerts

Published 2016-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Nicolo Grando shows how to create an alert in Power BI when a measure reaches a certain mark:

Set alerts to notify you when data in your dashboards changes beyond limits you set. Alerts work for numeric tiles featuring cards and gauges. Only you can see the alerts you set, even if you share your dashboard. Data alerts are fully synchronized across platforms.

How to do it?

That’s useful for turning Power BI dashboards into partial alerting systems.

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Power BI On-Prem In 2017

Published 2016-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley points out a blog post from the Reporting Services team:

When will we have this next Technical Preview?

We’re targeting January 2017 to release this next Technical Preview.

What’s the release vehicle for a production-ready version?

We plan to release the production-ready version in the next SQL Server release wave. We won’t be releasing it in a Service Pack, Cumulative Update, or other form of update for SSRS 2016.

When will we have a production-ready version?

We’re targeting availability in mid-2017.

That makes it sound like they’re pushing it to coincide with the vNext release.

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Power Query And M In Tabular

Published 2016-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb notes that Analysis Services Tabular will get Power Query and M support:

I’ve just argued why Microsoft was obliged to include this functionality in SSAS v.next but in fact there are many positive reasons for doing this too. The most obvious one is to do with support for more data sources. At the moment SSAS Tabular supports a pretty good range of data sources, but the world of BI is getting more and more diverse and in order to stay relevant SSAS needs to support far more than it does today. By using Power Query/M as its data access mechanism, SSAS v.next will immediately support a much larger number of data sources and this number is going to keep on growing: any investment that Microsoft or third parties make for Power BI in this area will also benefit SSAS. Also, because Power Query/M can query and fold to more than just relational databases, I suspect that in the future this will allow for DirectQuery connections to many of these non-relational data sources too.

Read the whole thing.

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PowerQuery Contains Filtering

Published 2016-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains two different methods of filtering which may look similar but can result in quite different outputs:

The script tells the whole story. Despite the fact that you typed in “Dan” and Power Query showed you all FirstNames that has “Dan” in it. the script still use equity filters for every individual FirstName. For this data set there won’t be any issue obviously, because all FirstNames with “Dan” is already selected. However if new data rows coming in to this table in the future, and they have records with FirstNames that are not one of these values, for example Dandy, it won’t be picked! As a result the filter won’t work exactly as you expect. That’s why I say this is misleading.

Read on for notes on how to put the Contains operator to good use.

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R Links

Published 2016-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant has some links on learning R in the context of Power BI:

Comprehensive Resource Archive Network [CRAN] is where one can download Open Source R, packages and contains lots of information about R.

Microsoft R Open which is a fully CRAN compatible version created using the Intel MKL for improved performance can be downloaded here.

One thing I would push a little bit on that list is R Tools for Visual Studio.  My default R IDE is still R Studio, but RTVS has made some nice improvements, and it’s worth checking out.

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Dial Gauge

Published 2016-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight explains the dial gauge custom visual:

  • The effectiveness of gauges on dashboards is an often debated topic.

  • The Dial Gauge is completely data driven. Which means not only must your measure (drives the needle) come from a dataset but also the different thresholds ranges must come from your dataset too.

  • There are no specific Format settings for the Dial Gauge, which does limit you a bit with what you can do with this gauge.

There are certain scenarios in which I think the dial gauge works well.  The best scenario is the the same as its analog counterpart:  when you are measuring a single continuous variable with a safe range and meaningful range differences.  This scenario occurs less often than you might think.

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Power BI Drillthrough

Published 2016-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant explains how to create and use hierarchies in Power BI:

Finding where to create hierarchies is the hardest part of creating them in Power BI, especially if one has ever created hierarchies in Excel Power Pivot as they are not it the same place. Hierarchies are not in the Relationships data view, instead they are found in the Report view. Right clicking on the ellipse next to any field in a table displays a menu, and the second item on the menu is New hierarchy. Hierarchies can also be created by clicking and dragging a field on top of another field, which also will create a hierarchy. Once the hierarchy has been created, to add another field to the hierarchy, drag a new value on top of the value with the hierarchy icon. If the value added is not added to the location you want it, click on the ellipse next to the field named and move the field up or down as you wish.

Ginger also shows how to create drillthrough reports once you have hierarchies in place.

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