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Category: Power BI

Managed Self-Service BI in Power BI

Gogula Aryalingam has started a series on managed self-service BI. Part 1 provides an overview of the topic:

When putting together a business intelligence strategy using Power BI, Microsoft recommends three primary strategies that an organization can adopt. Out of these, the one that I tend to go with is managed self-service BI, which brings forth the concept of discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge. This concept is the dominant strategy used for BI at Microsoft itself; explained very nicely in this article. It’s my personal favorite, because I find it an effective means of onboarding customers once the core platform is built with the required standards (discipline), and then help them adopt the solution from the edge, thus providing them with the best of both worlds.

Part 2 takes us to the edge:

Now, what happens when an analyst, for instance, has a set of sales target spreadsheets and wants to compare the figures with sales metrics so that salespeople’s performances can be measured? It certainly needs a new dataset. However, flexibility at the edge has to prevail in the right way. This post will look at how we can go about this keeping to discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge.

Note: The analyst’s requirement is at current local to their group or department. It has not yet been made an organizational requirement. That’s how most requirements start out: A requirement at the departmental level, and then when enough people start reaping the benefits within and outside of the department, it can get absorbed into the core.

Part 3 returns to the core:

One problem that we may have overlooked when building a bunch of core datasets in that post, is that certain dimensions tend to duplicate across the datasets. Imagine a scenario where the single master data source of a managed self-service setup is a data warehouse, which sources all the required dimensions. When you have, for example, core reseller sales, internet sales, and finance datasets, each one will have a calendar dimension and a few others created in each of these datasets. This is not ideal if you think about the extent of the duplication and effort that is required.

This is where, once again, using DQ for PBI datasets and AS comes into play, where you could draw up a layered core dataset architecture. If we take the example of AdventureWorks’ fact tables in the data warehouse (single master data source) you can figure out what the business processes are. 

Read on for Gogula’s thoughts. I think there’s a lot going for this particular strategy, especially in a large organization with hundreds (or thousands) of people actively using Power BI. At that point, doing everything through a central IT organization doesn’t scale very well.

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Power BI DevOps and CI/CD

Paul Turley tackles a difficult topic:

By most estimates, far more than 80% of all Power BI projects are small and performed by one Data Analyst or Developer. We know that Power BI is also used to develop high-volume datasets, models and business reports in full-scale deployment scenarios where DevOps principles are taken very seriously. So, with a significant minority of large-scale Power BI projects fitting into a category where someone might even think about fundamental concepts like version control or team development; what, exactly does DevOps for Power BI even mean when one size doesn’t fit every project?

Read the whole thing. Paul also includes a video on the topic for those so inclined.

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Importing Excel Files from SharePoint into Power BI

Gogula Aryalingam gets some data:

I’ve been asked the question many times, especially when I teach Dashboard in a Day: How do you import data from a bunch of Excel files stored on a SharePoint folder?

It’s a fairly simple process. It’s just that you need to know that you first connect to the SharePoint site (which could have quite a large number of folders and files, and several document libraries. You will need to know the path of your files, and then you keep filtering till you get to your content. I do this in two steps:

Read on for those steps.

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Degenerate Dimensions and Power BI DirectQuery

Chris Webb provides a warning:

A few weeks ago my colleague Dany Hoter wrote a post on the Azure Data Explorer blog about how using columns on fact tables as dimensions in DirectQuery mode can lead to errors in Power BI. You can read it here:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-data-explorer-blog/to-star-or-not-to-star-more-about-data-modeling-in-power-bi/ba-p/3689933

In the post he mentioned that he could reproduce the same behaviour in SQL Server, so I thought it would be good to show an example of this to raise awareness of the issue because I think it’s one that anyone using DirectQuery mode on any data source is likely to run into.

Read on to understand what might lead to (expected) errors and what you can do about it.

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Adding Emoji to Power BI Apps

Ed Hansberry ran out of words:

Your report page names, and in turn, the Power BI app can be enhanced with the judicious use of emoji. I was surprised to find out that the characters came through in full color, and that can help your users find the important pages faster. This can be especially useful in a large Power BI app with dozens of reports and potentially hundreds of pages.

Adding emoji is relatively straight-forward in Windows 10 and 11. Below are the steps for Windows 11.

Read on to learn how to do it with Windows 11, followed by the steps for Windows 10.

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Time Intelligence Templates in Bravo for Power BI

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari try out some templates:

Thanks to Bravo for Power BI, creating a Date table and applying time intelligence calculations to existing model measures has never been easier. With a few clicks, the Power BI model gets the required updates, and you can further modify the code generated.

Bravo provides several ready-to-use templates based on the Time Intelligence patterns published on the DAX Patterns website. However, the pattern may not provide all the features required. There could be columns and measures you want to remove, or you might need additional columns or time intelligence calculations that are not part of the template.

Read on to see two ways you could resolve this.

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Certifying Content in Power BI

Soheil Bakhshi certifies the quality of this Power BI content:

In the previous post, we discussed that a Power BI administrator must enable certification and grant sufficient rights to the security groups. Therefore, all members of the specified security group are authorised to certify the content. If you are a Power BI administrator, follow these steps to do so:

This post is a step-by-step guide to enabling content certification, as well as how to certify specific types of content.

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