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Category: Power BI

Thoughts on Separating Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Eugene Meidinger calls out my favorite law of headlines:

If you know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, then you know the answer is no. But let’s get into it anyway.

Recently there was LinkedIn post that made a bunch of great and valid points but ended on an odd one.

Number one change would be removing Power BI from Fabric completely and doubling down on making it even easier for the average business user, as I have previously covered in some posts.

It’s hard for me to take this as a serious proposal instead of wishful thinking, but I think the author is being serious, so let’s treat it as such.

Read on for a bit of history and why Eugene thinks this is a very bad idea.

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Changing the Source Lakehouse in a Power BI Deployment Pipeline

Chris Webb makes a switch:

If you’re using deployment pipelines with Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI you’ll have found that when you deploy your model from one stage to another by default the model still points to the Lakehouse it was originally bound to. So, for example, if you deploy your model from your Development stage to your test stage, the model in the Test stage still points to the Lakehouse in the Development stage. The good news is that you can use the deployment rules feature of deployment pipelines to make sure the model in the Test stage points to a Lakehouse in the Test stage and in this post I’ll show you how.

Click through for the process.

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Thoughts on Dogma and Power BI

Eugene Meidinger wants you to leave Plato’s cave:

I continue to be really frustrated about the dogmatic approach to Power BI. Best practices become religion, not to be questioned or elaborated on. Only to be followed. And you start to end up with these 10 Power BI modeling commandments:

Click through for those ten, followed by a valuable rant. This one’s a challenge for me because I understand where Eugene is going and agree. But there exists a fairly large subset of the population for whom Power BI (or whatever) isn’t a core part of the job and these people simply want an answer in order to complete a task and move on, not to gain a deeper understanding of the product. And it can be a challenge to differentiate these people from the people who would benefit from the more detailed explanation.

In short, you can drag a man out of Plato’s cave, but you can’t make him think.

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Replacing Images in PBIR Reports

Meagan Longoria performs a switcharoo:

With the PBIR format of Power BI reports, it’s much easier to make report updates outside of Power BI Desktop. One thing you may want to do is to switch out an image in a report. Maybe you need to rebrand a report, updating some of the images (logos and background images). You could import the images or use image URLs with DAX, but that comes with its own problems. If you have some dev ops or automation skills, this becomes pretty easy.

Read on to see how.

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Recovering Power BI Reports and Semantic Models

Kurt Buhler saves the day:

In the Power BI service or Microsoft Fabric, you might encounter situations where you can’t download a report or model from a workspace. Depending on your workflow, this could be problematic; for instance, you might need to work further on this file in Power BI Desktop. To do that, you first need to recover a Power BI Desktop (PBIX) file or the newer format, Power BI Projects (PBIP).

Read on for several reasons as to why you might not be able to download the file, and what you can do about it, using the semantic link library and semantic-link-labs.

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Shared Semantic Models in Power BI

Soheil Bakhshi shares some data:

This blog series complements a YouTube tutorial I published earlier this month, where I quickly covered the scenario and implementation of shared semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. However, I realised this topic demands a more detailed explanation for those who need a deeper understanding of the processes and considerations involved in one of the most common enterprise-grade BI scenarios.

Read on for part 2 of this series. Soheil also includes a link back to part 1 if you missed it.

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Filter and Parameter Passing from Power BI to Power Apps

Jon Voege runs into a problem:

A simple comment App embedded in Power BI was supposed to show all the comments in a Sharepoint List which matched the filters set in Power BI. But…. Not all comments were showing up, even though the Sharepoint List only held about 10 comments at the time!

Why you ask? Well, the issue stems from the fact that the table of data being sent from Power BI to Power Apps, the PowerBIIntegration.Data object, has a hard limitation of 1000 rows. And those 1000 rows, is all that we get to work with.

Read on to learn more, as well as a workaround to this issue.

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Cosine Similarity in Power Query

John Kerski searches for similar sets:

I’ll admit upfront—I am not a data scientist by trade. Instead, I’ve picked up my data science skills over time, learning through a combination of osmosis from talented colleagues and tackling real-world data challenges. It’s been a journey of trial, error, and refinement, as I’ve worked to bridge gaps between complex data science techniques and tools available to me.

Recently, my skills were put to the test when I needed to compare hundreds of Active Directory and SharePoint Groups to find similarities in their memberships. With only Power Query available in the production environment, no Python or R to ease the process, I faced the task of finding a method to finding similarities from scratch in Power Query. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the solution I developed, highlighting the steps that made it possible.

John came up with a very clever solution. By the way, the way I like to explain cosine similarity (as a concept, not the algorithm itself) is as follows.

Back in high school physics, you probably drew vectors and learned that vectors have a direction and a magnitude (length). We drew vectors in two-dimensional space because that’s easy: it’s a line on a sheet of paper and there’s an arrow at the end to denote the direction of that vector. Conceptually, vectors with more than two dimensions behave exactly the same; the difference is that we cannot simply draw them, especially once we get past three-dimensional space (a vector with three elements). But the concept is still there: every vector has a direction and a magnitude.

We use cosine similarity to compare two vectors and see how close those two vectors are in terms of angle (direction), with the idea being that magnitude isn’t as important as angle for determining vector similarity. This is in contrast to another technique like Euclidean distance, which focuses more on the magnitude of the vectors versus angle.

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Using Perspectives in Power BI

Koen Verbeeck turns his head just slightly:

Since the days of Analysis Services Multidimensional, we could create perspectives on our cubes. A perspective provides the opportunity to show only a selection of items (facts, dimensions, or measures) to a user. In Analysis Services Tabular, the same functionality is also available, and it helps to make complex models more digestible for end users. Right now, we have a big model in Power BI that covers different domains of our organization. We would like to create perspectives too, but is this even possible in Power BI?

Click through for the answer, as well as an important note that perspectives are for usability, not security.

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Re-Using Visual Formatting between Power BI Reports

Kurt Buhler does a bit of recycling:

If you build Power BI reports, then you know how much time it costs to format visuals so that they work and look the way that you want them to. This applies not only when you make new reports, but also when you need to maintain or make changes to existing ones. When a report gets fancy in its design (sometimes unnecessarily so, if we are frank), then, often, this is accompanied by a need for many formatting tweaks and changes. Inevitably, this formatting becomes time consuming (and sometimes frustrating) to deal with when there is a problem to fix or a modification to make. How can we make formatting and maintaining Power BI reports both more convenient and more efficient?

Read on for the answer.

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