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Category: Power BI

Real-Time Power BI Dashboards

Published 2016-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad builds a real-time dashboard with Stream Analytics and Power BI:

IoT Devices or Applications can pass their data to Azure Event Hub, and Azure Event hub can be used as an input to Azure Stream Analytics (which is a data streaming Azure service). Then Azure stream analytics can pass the data from input based on queries to outputs. If Power BI be used as an output then a dataset in Power BI will be generated that can be used for real-time dashboard.

As a result anytime a new data point from application or IoT device comes through Event hubs, and then Stream Analytics, Power BI dashboard will automatically update with new information.

This is a pretty nice weekend project.

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Integrating Power BI Into Powerpoint

Published 2016-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how to tell a data story using a combination of Powerpoint and Power BI:

You can see here that I’ve added a title for this slide in Power Point, and also a Textbox with text “Psychology has the most sales”. Yes, with this method you can add commentary to Power BI reports and dashboards, you can tell the story behind the data with integration of Power BI and Power Point. very simple feature but really useful.

Under each Power BI tile in Power Point there will be a link to Power BI

Read the whole thing.

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Power BI And Impala

Published 2016-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Justin Kestelyn describes the Impala Connector for Power BI Desktop:

Note that the connector currently only supports Import mode, which requires downloading the query output data to the local data model. In future updates, we will enhance the connector with DirectQuery capabilities, as well as with support for refresh scenarios via the Power BI Gateway. [Ed. Note: As of the August 2016 update, the Impala Connector also supports DirectQuery mode, which means you are always viewing the most up-to-date data. The functionality for both periodic refreshes and DirectQuery mode require the Power BI Gateway running either on-premise or in Microsoft Azure.]

Enabling Power BI connectivity to Impala has been a very frequently requested capability from our customers. We encourage you to give it a try and share with us any feedback or issues that you encounter via the “Send a Frown” feature in Power BI Desktop.

Good stuff.

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Table Heatmaps

Published 2016-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

  • In the Table Heatmap the color of the boxes is determined by the value in your measure.

  • Only 1 category field can be used, which will dynamically generate the number of columns based on the number of distinct values your field has.

  • The number and types of colors can be changed using some of the settings we’ll discuss below.

I can see the table heatmap being a good visual for calendars.

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Group Workspaces

Published 2016-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant shows how to use Group Workspaces within Power BI to allow a team to work together on the same files without stepping on each other’s feet:

Many of the functionality people associate with source control programs live inside the group one drive which is created for Power BI. Looking at the picture of the group screen, which was created when a Power BI Workspace was created, you will see that this group contains 7 members and four files. The members of this groups are the only ones who have access to the files. The file AcmeThree.pbix is selected, and cClicking on the elipise (…) brings up a menu for the file. Notice one of them is Check Out. If I check out a file, the icon next to the name changes, providing a visual queue to all who wish to edit the file that it is being working on. The menu option for me would change to Check In, providing the ability to check the file in to the directory, allowing others to check out the file and work on it. Notice Version History also exists. This feature allows previous versions of the file to be loaded, which means that changes made to a file can be rolled back.

It’s good that this is available, and I’d make use of it.  For Power BI Desktop, it seems prudent to continue using source control.

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Tornado Visual

Published 2016-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight looks at the Tornado chart:

  • The Tornado has a few limitation that should be aware of before using

    • If there’s a legend value it should only have 2 distinct values

    • Each distinct category values is a separate bar with left or right parts

    • Alternatively, you can have two measure values and compare them without  a legend

I’m split on whether I like the tornado or not.  It is intuitive and information-dense, which are two major factors in its favor.  It is, however, difficult to read and compare.  This seems like a useful “big picture” chart, but you’d want to organize the data in a different way when you start drilling down.

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Power BI Line Charts

Published 2016-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad digs into line charts:

Value Line

Line chart can show one or more measures as measures, such as Sales Amount, Total Costs, Quantity of the goods sold and etc.

Trend Line

Depends on the variety of values across a time period, Line chart can illustrate a straight line as a trend. This trend is good to understand how in overall products are selling, is revenue going up or down for example.

Reference Line

You might want to define minimum, maximum, average, or median values for your line chart as separate lines, and compare values lines with these lines. These are reference lines which can be dynamically created based on value of measures in the chart.

I think this was a rather helpful post in figuring out what Power BI is capable of doing, although if you build a lot of charts that look like Reza’s last example, you probably want to scale that back a bit.

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R And Power BI

Published 2016-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

David Smith points out some of the work the Power BI team has done to integrate R into their product:

Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization and reporting platform, has made great strides in the past year integrating the R language. This Computerworld article describes the recent advances with Power BI and R. In short, you can:

Click through for more things you can do, as well as additional links and resources.

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Last Item In Each Group

Published 2016-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows how to get the last item in each group using Power Query:

Scenario that I want to solve as an example is this:

FactInternetSales has sales transaction information for each customer, by each product, each order date and some other information. We want to have a grouped table by customer, which has the number of sales transaction by each customer, total sales amount for that customer, the first and the last sales amount for that customer. First and last defined by the first and last order date for the transaction.

In T-SQL, this sounds like the job of window functions.  In Power BI, we write M.

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