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Category: Power BI

Converting SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports

Olivier Van Steenlandt makes a move:

In this blog post, we will be going through the process to convert a Reporting Services report to a Power BI Paginated report and deploy it in the end.

For this blog post, I have created a very basic SSRS report named Product Sales Overview. This report gets his data from an Azure SQL Database which contains the default dummy database (AdventureWorksLT).

Read the whole thing. It makes me wonder, though, if there’s an automated process for doing these conversions, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of reports.

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Power BI Licensing Guide

Reza Rad busts out the calculator:

Licensing in Power BI comes with many options. Understanding which features are included in which licensing plan is always a question for users. In this article and video, you will learn about all the different licensing plans in Power BI, the scenarios for which to use the licensing, and scenarios for which you may need to change your licensing. This article and video are intended to help you to decide the most cost-effective licensing plan for your requirement.

Reza goes into great detail in the post and then answers a lot of questions in the comments as well.

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DAX Window Functions and Power BI DirectQuery

Chris Webb points out another benefit of DAX window functions:

The new DAX window functions (announced here, more details on Jeffrey Wang’s blog here and here) have generated a lot of excitement already – they are extremely powerful. However one important benefit of using them has not been mentioned so far: they can give you much better performance in DirectQuery mode because they make it more likely that aggregations are used. After all, the fastest DirectQuery datasets are the ones that can use aggregations (ideally Import mode aggregations) as much as possible.

As always, Chris has a demo for us, so check it out.

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Calculating Present Value in Power Query

Imke Feldmann has a function for us:

Finally 2023 is here, the year we expect Power Query function libraries to ship. This will make it so much easier to re-use ready made function than M-extensions. So let’s start collecting some fodder for it, by creating a function to calculate the Present Value (PV) for Power Query:

Click through for that function, as well as an explanation of what it’s doing.

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Managed Self-Service BI in Power BI

Gogula Aryalingam has started a series on managed self-service BI. Part 1 provides an overview of the topic:

When putting together a business intelligence strategy using Power BI, Microsoft recommends three primary strategies that an organization can adopt. Out of these, the one that I tend to go with is managed self-service BI, which brings forth the concept of discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge. This concept is the dominant strategy used for BI at Microsoft itself; explained very nicely in this article. It’s my personal favorite, because I find it an effective means of onboarding customers once the core platform is built with the required standards (discipline), and then help them adopt the solution from the edge, thus providing them with the best of both worlds.

Part 2 takes us to the edge:

Now, what happens when an analyst, for instance, has a set of sales target spreadsheets and wants to compare the figures with sales metrics so that salespeople’s performances can be measured? It certainly needs a new dataset. However, flexibility at the edge has to prevail in the right way. This post will look at how we can go about this keeping to discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge.

Note: The analyst’s requirement is at current local to their group or department. It has not yet been made an organizational requirement. That’s how most requirements start out: A requirement at the departmental level, and then when enough people start reaping the benefits within and outside of the department, it can get absorbed into the core.

Part 3 returns to the core:

One problem that we may have overlooked when building a bunch of core datasets in that post, is that certain dimensions tend to duplicate across the datasets. Imagine a scenario where the single master data source of a managed self-service setup is a data warehouse, which sources all the required dimensions. When you have, for example, core reseller sales, internet sales, and finance datasets, each one will have a calendar dimension and a few others created in each of these datasets. This is not ideal if you think about the extent of the duplication and effort that is required.

This is where, once again, using DQ for PBI datasets and AS comes into play, where you could draw up a layered core dataset architecture. If we take the example of AdventureWorks’ fact tables in the data warehouse (single master data source) you can figure out what the business processes are. 

Read on for Gogula’s thoughts. I think there’s a lot going for this particular strategy, especially in a large organization with hundreds (or thousands) of people actively using Power BI. At that point, doing everything through a central IT organization doesn’t scale very well.

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Power BI DevOps and CI/CD

Paul Turley tackles a difficult topic:

By most estimates, far more than 80% of all Power BI projects are small and performed by one Data Analyst or Developer. We know that Power BI is also used to develop high-volume datasets, models and business reports in full-scale deployment scenarios where DevOps principles are taken very seriously. So, with a significant minority of large-scale Power BI projects fitting into a category where someone might even think about fundamental concepts like version control or team development; what, exactly does DevOps for Power BI even mean when one size doesn’t fit every project?

Read the whole thing. Paul also includes a video on the topic for those so inclined.

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Importing Excel Files from SharePoint into Power BI

Gogula Aryalingam gets some data:

I’ve been asked the question many times, especially when I teach Dashboard in a Day: How do you import data from a bunch of Excel files stored on a SharePoint folder?

It’s a fairly simple process. It’s just that you need to know that you first connect to the SharePoint site (which could have quite a large number of folders and files, and several document libraries. You will need to know the path of your files, and then you keep filtering till you get to your content. I do this in two steps:

Read on for those steps.

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