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Category: Power BI

Rounded Corners in Power BI Error Bars

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira trims off the edges:

If you’ve been following my posts, you probably know by now that one of the things that really annoys me in Power BI is not being able to build bar charts with rounded corners, unless you use a custom visual.

However, recently I found out about a trick to make this happen without needing to use custom visuals (special shout out to Federico Pastor who shared this trick with me!).

Read on to see how you can do this. It’s definitely not ideal, but if you absolutely need rounded corners for your bar chart, you can get them this way.

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Testing a Power BI Theme on Existing Reports

Published 2023-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen does a wardrobe upgrade:

But I want to see how my new theme might look on some old report where I might have used another theme or perhaps some reports other users have created where they have done some individual formatting instead of using the theme.

And did you know – we can do it and see the result for existing report in your workspaces – and we can directly modify the theme and see if we should change a color or a font size or a….

Read on for the process. This is a clever use of the embedding service, that’s for sure.

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Automatic Refresh in Power BI

Published 2023-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb does some ‘splainin’:

One of the most confusing things about troubleshooting Power BI refresh problems is the way Power BI will sometimes try running a refresh again after it has failed. It means that refreshes seem to take a lot longer than you would expect and also that more queries are run against your data source than you would expect. I don’t have all the answers but I thought it would be useful to highlight a few scenarios where it does happen.

Read on for two scenarios in which you might find this.

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Calculating Reservation-Based Savings in Azure

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Saira Shaik reserves some instances:

I have created this dashboard to display the savings made due to the purchase of Reservations or Savings Plans or by signing the agreement with Microsoft to get Azure Commitment Discounts (ACD).
This dashboard is helpful for Customers who:

  • Purchased Reservations or
  • Purchased Savings Plan or
  • Signed Monthly Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) and got a special discounted price.


Customers can view their savings by uploading the Amortized files into this Power BI file.

Click through to se what the dashboard includes and how it all works. Then, check out Saira’s GitHub repo for the template.

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Formatting Visuals in Power BI Desktop

Published 2023-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows off the new visual formatter in Power BI Desktop:

Where is the Format visual option in the new Power BI Desktop? There is a simple answer to this question, which I explained in this blog and video. This change applied from March 2023 version of Power BI Desktop, and by the time you read this article, it might be at general availability and the only way to format a visual in the Power BI Desktop.

I do hope they also keep the old way of formatting visuals, as there appear to be fewer clicks involved.

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Publish to Power BI Environments via ADO

Published 2023-05-10 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank deploys a report:

In the first post in this series, I built an Azure DevOps pipeline to automate steps in a Power BI development workflow. The pipeline implemented a very basic workflow – as soon as a developer committed a new report version to Git, the pipeline deployed it immediately into a Power BI workspace.

In this post I’ll be building a pipeline to support a more sophisticated workflow that enables peer review and stakeholder testing.

Click through for the step-by-step process.

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Connecting Power BI to ADX via Private Endpoint

Published 2023-05-09 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter keeps it all on the Azure backbone:

The PBI developer creating datasets and reports need to connect to the ADX cluster using Power BI desktop.

To establish such a connection, the user’s IP address should be allowed access to the private end point.

The access should be tested using Kusto Web explorer (KWE) to make sure that the cluster can be reached.

If KWE can connect , Power BI desktop should also connect successfully and a report using the cluster in Direct Query or import can be created.

That’s the goal, and Dany shows us the way to do it.

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WaitTime in Power BI

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains what a new metric means:

What does WaitTime represent? Here’s the technical explanation: it’s the wait time on the query thread pool in the Analysis Services engine before the query starts to run. But what does this mean for you as someone trying to tune DAX queries in Power BI?

Chris provides an examplation of exactly that. This tracking of noisy neighbors is interesting, as it would provide insight if you’re noticing variance in dataset refresh times.

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Modifying Dynamic Format Strings in Power BI

Published 2023-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers tries out a neat feature:

I was recently testing out and using the great new Power BI feature using dynamic format strings in Power BI.

What I found that currently it is not possible or easy to modify an existing dynamic format string.

In this blog post below I show you how I managed to modify the dynamic format string, so that you do not need to DELTE it and re-create it!

Click through to learn how. This works really well for currency-style scenarios, like the one Gilbert shows. I could also see it providing different levels of precision based on how large the value is.

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