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Category: Power BI

Adding Pagination to Bar Charts

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Riqo Chaar turns the page:

Good User Experience (UX) design is crucial in enabling stakeholders to maximise the insights that they are able to derive from Power BI reports.  One common challenge of report design is effectively managing and displaying large datasets in bar charts without overwhelming the user. This article will describe the process behind a method that can mitigate this issue: adding pagination to bar chart visuals. This visual will provide the following functionality:

  • A number of categories filter: users can specify how many categories they would like to see per bar chart page
  • A page filter: users can navigate to different pages to see more categories

Click through to see how. I tend to prefer Power BI dashboards be glanceable, so pagination defeat that purpose to some extent. But so does having to scroll through a large list.

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Reading Parquet Metadata in Power Query

Published 2024-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb taps into the source:

There’s a new M function in Power Query in Power BI that allows you to read the data from a Parquet file: Parquet.Metadata. It’s not documented yet and it’s currently marked as “intended for internal use only” but I’ve been told I can blog about it. Here’s an example of how to use it:

Click through to see what you can get in a Parquet file. This is part of the secret of why the Parquet file format is so fast.

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New Power BI Course

Published 2024-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger has gone indie:

The goal of this course is to orient you to the various pieces of Power BI, identify the source of problem, and give some general tips for solving them. If you are stuck and need help now, this should help.

Note! This is an early launch. Modules 1 and 2 are available now, and the remaining ones will be coming out weekly.

You can see the first module of Eugene’s course on YouTube and throw money at him to get the rest as he rolls it out. And if you do decide to throw money at him, load a bunch of pennies into a cannon and blast them at him, then tell him I sent you.

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Performance Costs of using Calculated Columns in Power BI Composite Models

Published 2024-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb share a warning:

I don’t have anything against the use of calculated columns in Power BI semantic models in general but you do need to be careful using them with DirectQuery mode. In particular when you have a DirectQuery connection to another Power BI semantic model – also known as a composite model on a Power BI semantic model – it’s very easy to cause serious performance problems with calculated columns. Let’s see a simple example of why this is.

Read on for Chris’s example.

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The State of CI/CD in Power BI

Published 2024-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley violates Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

The answer – finally – is a resounding YES! It has been a long road and the path to implementing Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI/CD) in all of its forms for Power BI is still a journey, but the capabilities are now a reality. This broad category includes a range of features and capabilities related to managing project files with version control and the ability to share and collaborate with other development team members. Additionally, we also have the ability to assign individual components of a solution to different team members who then check-out files and develop features, check them back in and merge changes into a feature branch. In enterprise-class projects, having these capabilities enables true Development Operations or DevOps: a process for managing iterative development, testing and deployment with automated builds, using a central process management tool. Implementing full-fledged DevOps is a big lift for most Business Intelligence professionals but the core concept of code version control is essential for any durable project.

Read on for Paul’s thoughts on the importance of source control and how you can pull this off.

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Fixing the Power BI Error “Something Is Wrong with One or More Fields”

Published 2024-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler broke it and now needs to buy it:

The “grey box of death” in Power BI is unfortunately a common sight for anyone creating reports. When you see this grey error box, it means that the visual can’t obtain a valid result. If that error says “Something is wrong with one or more fields”, then there’s several possible reasons for this:

Click through for those reasons, as well as how to fix the problem. Kurt shows this both in video form and written out, so check it out.

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Power BI Themes Gallery

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Seth Bauer shares a tip:

Welcome to today’s tutorial where we’ll explore the Power BI Tips+ Theme Generator and its incredible features designed to streamline your Power BI report building experience. In this walkthrough, we’ll guide you through the process of getting started with the Power BI Tips+ Gallery, focusing on the Sunset theme. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to effortlessly integrate our pre-configured Gallery Projects into your Power BI reports. It doesn’t get easier than this!

Click through for the process, including a video on how to do it.

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Stack Overflows in Power Query

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits an error:

If you’re writing your own M code in Power Query in Power BI or Excel you may run into the following error:

Expression.Error: Evaluation resulted in a stack overflow and cannot continue.

If you’re a programmer you probably know what a stack overflow is; if you’re not you might search for the term, find this Wikipedia article and still have no clue what has happened. Either way it may still be difficult to understand why you’re running into it in Power Query. To explain let’s see some examples.

Read on to learn what a stack overflow is, how you can create one, and circumstances in which one might arise in Power Query and M. Now Chris has me thinking about tail call recursion this early in the morning.

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Loading Data from Statistics Denmark into Power BI

Published 2024-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen goes over an oldie:

It turns out that the blogpost I wrote 10 years ago about getting data from Statistics Denmark into Power BI with Power Query still is being used – link.

But as the API has changed a bit since then I was asked to do an update of the blogpost – so here is how you can get the population of Denmark imported into Power BI with Power Query.

Read on to see the right way to do it today.

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