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Category: Power BI

Recovering Power BI Reports You Cannot Download

Published 2024-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler grabs a report:

Below are some reasons why you might not be able to download your Power BI report or model from a workspace:

  • The report was created in the service:
    • Someone created the report manually (using the User Interface) and connects to a model in another workspace.
    • Someone created the report programmatically (for instance, using the REST APIs).
    • Power BI created the report automatically (for instance, it copied the report to a workspace that belongs to a later stage in a deployment pipeline)
  • You used the REST APIs to re-bind a report (changed which model it connects to as a data source).
  • The model has incremental refresh enabled.
  • The model uses automatic aggregations.
  • The model was modified via an XMLA endpoint.
  • Other scenarios described in the limitations in the Microsoft documentation.

When you encounter this scenario, you see something like the following image, which shows the Download this file option greyed out from the File menu of the Power BI report.

Read on to see how you can nonetheless recover these published reports using the semantic-link-labs library.

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Programmatic Power BI Report Modification via semantic-link-labs

Published 2024-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler makes a change:

Whether building reports in Power BI Desktop or in the web browser via the Power BI service, you have limited options to batch or streamline changes. Put another way; it’s tedious and slow to make many small changes to one or more Power BI reports. It’s also easy to make mistakes

When initially designing or building a report, this is not so much of a problem. Unless you’re using a template, you want to control report layout and formatting, yourself. However, certain changes can be little more than a waste of time. Some examples include:

  • Replacing fields when there’s a broken reference due to i.e. renaming a model measure or column.
  • Swapping one measure or column for another in the report
  • Changing visual container styles, like background, border, and shadow/glow.
  • Changing text or text styles across multiple visuals, pages, or reports.
  • Changing chart formatting (like color) or properties (like edit interactions) across multiple visuals, pages, or reports.

Read on to see how you can make some of these changes in Python code using the semantic-link-labs library.

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Managing Power BI Assets with semantic-link-labs

Published 2024-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler takes us through a Python library:

Thus far, the part of Microsoft Fabric that I’ve personally found the most interesting is not Copilot, Direct Lake, or its data warehousing capabilities, but a combination of notebooks and simple file/table storage via Lakehouses. Specifically, the library semantic link and its “expansion pack” semantic-link-labs, spearheaded by Michael Kovalsky. These tools help you build, manage, use, and audit the various items in Fabric from a Python notebook, including Power BI semantic models and reports.

Semantic-link-labs provide a lot of convenient functions that you can use to automate and streamline certain tasks during Power BI development; both of models and reports. For me, I’m particularly interested in the reporting functionalities, because this is where I typically find that I lose the most time, and because there is a drought of tools to address this area.

Read the whole thing.

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Debugging a DAX Measure with DAX Query View

Published 2024-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres sorts out an issue:

DAX Query View was created some time ago and it was a great tool to run DAX inside Power BI environment.

However, testing a measure in DAX Query View may not be something so obvious. While the measure in a report obeys to the filter context and most of times results in a single value, the filter context doesn’t exist in Query View and the execution needs to return a table.

In this way, a simple copy/past of the measure in DAX Query View will not run. The measure needs to be adapted to be tested.

Let’s analyze one sample case to discover how this happens.

Click through for the answer.

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Creating Custom Visuals in Power BI with DAX

Published 2024-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler shows one way to customize Power BI visuals:

When creating reports in Power BI, you regularly come across scenarios where you want to show data in a certain way that is not straightforward in the standard “core visuals”. Sometimes, the visualization needs to reflect particularities about an organization’s business processes or its data. Other times, you simply want a more creative design to visualize the data in the most effective way. In this article, we discuss what to do in these scenarios, describing one method where you can make custom visualizations by using a single DAX measure, and the caveats and limitations of this particular approach.

In this article, our objective is to produce a matrix visual with the Timeline SVG, like in the following diagram.

Read on for several methods to handle when Power BI doesn’t do something out of the box, and a focus on creating a custom visual via DAX measure with an SVG. But do read the whole thing, as Kurt explains why this isn’t necessarily a great method.

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Connecting to Power BI as a Guest User

Published 2024-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck can only enter a tenant with explicit permission:

Sometimes your Microsoft Entra ID account (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) is added as a guest user in another tenant. This happens quite a lot when you’re a consultant and your client can’t create a new user in their own tenant, so they add the account of your own company as a guest instead. If you’re not a consultant, it can also happen after a merger or acquisition and you’re suddenly stuck with multiple tenants.

Yeah, this is a real annoyance with Microsoft Fabric / Power BI. Koen links to a 5-year-old feature request that I recommend upvoting.

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Page Navigation in Power BI

Published 2024-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Nikil Prabhakar turns the page:

Navigating between pages in Power BI reports is a critical aspect of creating a smooth and interactive user experience. Over time, Power BI has introduced several ways to implement page navigation, each with its own benefits and challenges. In this article, we’ll explore three different methods of page navigation and their use cases:

  1. Button Navigation
  2. Page Navigator
  3. Slicer and Button Combination

Read on for those three mechanisms. There’s also a video taking you through the process.

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A Quick Reference Guide for Power BI

Published 2024-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Hristo Hristov tabulates:

I need a structured reference guide to help me get started or expand on my Power BI knowledge. I want to be able to bookmark a resource and use it daily when needed as I build my data sets, reports, and dashboards. Can you please enumerate some common and helpful resources as a Power BI Quick Reference guide?

Click through for plenty of links to prior MSSQLTips articles.

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Syncing Slicers in Power BI without Bi-Directional Relationships

Published 2024-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld avoids the dreaded bi-directional relationship:

Have you ever wanted to sync two slicers on a report page? Even when both slicers are coming from different dimensions? A lot of users end up setting the relationships to bi-directional (both) which has huge side effects! You may up with a ambiguous data model, over filtering fact tables and wrong results. Also, there is a very likely performance impact to this solution.

But actually, to make the slicers sync, you don’t have to change the relationships! In this blog I will show you how you can sync two (or more) slicers on a report page without changing the relationships or the semantic model!

Read on to learn how.

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