Category: Power BI

Matthew Roche has an update for us:

Power BI includes capabilities to enable users to understand the content they own, and how different items relate to each other. Sometimes you may need a custom “big picture” view that built-in features don’t deliver, and this is where the Scanner API comes in.

Read on to learn what the Power BI Scanner API is and some of the most interesting updates. Matthew also has a link to the announcement with a full set of updates.

Melissa Coates offers up an explanation:

If you hear the question: “What’s a Power BI app?” you might think there’s a straightforward answer. However, the term ‘app’ is pretty overloaded term in the world of Power BI.

One time I was presenting a session and talking about Power BI apps vs. workspaces – right in the middle, someone in the audience starts asking me a Power Apps question because they thought I was talking about that (which is a VERY different thing). That was a big reminder to not to assume that we all have the same understanding of terms.

Read on to learn what a Power BI app is, as well as why it’s a rather useful concept.

Gilbert Quevauvilliers counts the ways:

I was recently helping out a customer and they contacted me asking why was the export option not in the format that they expected.

I had a look and now because there are so many options to export data, each one exports the data differently.

My goal for this blog post is to show you what each export type looks like, so when a user is exporting data, they can export in the format they expect.

It turns out that there are several such ways and Gilbert describes each.

Chris Webb gets rid of them scribbles what you sometimes find on perfectly good letters:

…then the output is “un garon trs g Nol”. As you can see, removing all the characters leads to unreadable text. Instead, what you have to do is find all the letters with diacritics (accents and other glyphs that can be added to characters) and remove the diacritics. Doing this may be ungrammatical and make it harder to understand the meaning of the text but in most cases the text will still be readable.

The bad news is that there is no straightforward way to do this in Power Query, and indeed there is no straightforward way to do this at all because there are no hard-and-fast rules about what to replace a letter with a diacritic with: should “ö” become “o” or “oe” for example? My first thought was to create a big lookup table with all the rules of what to replace each character with in, similar to the approach taken here for solving this problem in Google Sheets. Building a comprehensive lookup table would be gigantic task though.

Chris does take a different approach, though do read the comments because there are scenarios in which a simple removal of the diacritic can lead to a not-so-subtle alteration of the phrase.

Teo Lachev digs into a preview feature:

Microsoft announced a public preview of Power BI Dataset scale-out (DSO) for Power Premium, Premium per User (PPU), and Power BI Embedded. In the comments below the announcement, the article implies that this feature is a replacement for the Azure Analysis Services scale-out. “If you have an AAS scale out and you migrate your databases (aka models aka datasets aka cubes) to Power BI Premium, you get scale out automatically and at no extra cost.” Scaling out for free? Sure, where do I sign?

But then further down the comments, we have this clarification “[Power BI DSO happens] if a dataset is on peak load and the vcores of your capacity aren’t maxed out. Keep in mind that scalability on a single instance isn’t linear. By scaling out, we can achieve a better utilization of available CPU resources for high workloads. On the other hand, if your vcores are already maxed out, then scaling out brings no further perf benefit.” Confused? So was I, and I reached for clarification to Microsoft. Below, is my best understanding of what happens behind the scenes.

Click through for the answer.