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Category: Power BI

Power BI Gateway Troubleshooting

Published 2016-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Saxton has four tips to assist with troubleshooting On-Premesis Data Gateway issues within Power BI:

We know that the problem is remote applications being unable to connect to SQL Server. I want to simplify this and get the gateway out of the picture.

A lot of times we can become fixated on the app we are looking at and ignore other possibilities. You may know that locally works and remote does and start looking at why the gateway specifically isn’t working. Maybe you start to think something on the Power BI side is broken, or maybe we can’t talk to the Azure Service Bus. This is why I like to remove the gateway from the picture. Or, if you had a custom application, let’s remove that from the picture. Simplify as best you can. This helps to exclude a lot of potential complexity.

How do we do that? You can use the same test that you used locally! Use something like a UDL file or another tool to see if it can connect. Because it is SQL Server, I’d really like to try Management Studio. Management Studio uses .NET as does the gateway. To start, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same machine as the gateway. If you have a different machine that has Management Studio installed, use that! If that works, then we may want to do the test specifically from the gateway machine.

This is a good troubleshooting guide, dealing with some of the more likely causes before moving on to the esoteric issues.

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Power BI, Excel, SharePoint, And Data Refreshing

Published 2016-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to ensure that data refresh works when you store multiple Excel workbooks in SharePoint or OneDrive:

I can hear you yawning already – yet another blog post on getting data from multiple Excel workbooks in Power Query and Power BI. Just about everyone who has ever written a blog post on Power BI has written about this subject, including me. However there’s a twist this time: what if your Excel workbooks are stored in SharePoint or OneDrive For Business? If they are, then your dataset may not refresh successfully after you have published unless you load your data in a particular way.

Read the whole thing if you work with Power BI.

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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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