Category: Power BI

Reza Rad brings order to things:

The question I often get in my Power BI architecture consulting sessions is; “How should we organize our workspaces? should we have one workspace with all the reports in it? Or multiple? Should we split it based on each report? Business unit? or something else?” In this article and video, I’ll explain a guide on how to organize and set up workspaces in your organization.

Click through for a video and a helpful article.

Chris Webb breaks the limits:

My recent post on passing any value to a Power BI dynamic M parameter from a report generated quite a lot of interest but only among people who use DirectQuery mode and who want more flexibility when filtering. In this post, however, I’ll show you an application for this technique that is useful for anyone, regardless of whether they are using DirectQuery mode or Import mode, and which is nothing to do with filtering.

You’re probably familiar with Power BI’s what-if parameter feature which allows end users to pass values into calculations. It’s great but it has one big limitation: all the values that can be used need to be hard-coded in a calculated table at design time. What if (haha) you could let your users enter the values they wanted to use in the report instead? Let’s see a simple example of how to do this.

There’s a little bit of trickery but this solves a problem that I’ve had with What-If scenarios for a while: by asking the question, you naturally invite additional scenario ideas and people want to try them out right then and there.

Imke Feldmann performs a balancing act:

This article presents a method to automatically plug or balance your balance sheet in Power BI. You can use it if your bookkeeping system doesn’t contain the Profit and Loss (PnL) bookings yet. Or for planning or financial modelling purposes when your calculated balance sheet figures don’t add up.

Click through for the example, which pertains to including a current year profit/loss on the reporting breakdown.

Paul Turley keeps it fresh:

Business users often need to know how fresh the data is that they see on a Power BI report. This requirement can be interpreted to mean either “when was the last date & time that the source data was updated?” or “when was the last date & time that the data model was refreshed?”

Read on for Paul’s current solution to the problem of knowing the last time this data was refreshed.

Imke Feldmann has a clever solution to a problem:

When you reference another query in Power Query you will automatically get the results of the final step. But what if you want to reference a step that sits within that referenced query?

One solution would be to split up that query into 2 and reference the final result of the splitted query. But that could result in additional query time, as the data might be pulled from the source twice (once for each query).

Read on for a better way to do it.