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Category: Power BI

Thoughts on the New Power BI Accessible Themes

Meagan Longoria is moderately pleased:

Everyone’s vision is a little different. It is rare (impossible?) that a color theme is accessible for everyone. For instance, while many people with color vision deficiency have trouble distinguishing red and green hues, others have trouble distinguishing blue hues. So when we optimize to accommodate one condition, we may make things more difficult for another condition. This happened with the change in accent color in Power BI Desktop from yellow to teal. Changing to teal increased color contrast, which was great for people with low vision, but it caused new issues for some people with color vision deficiency.

While I am very happy to see these new color themes, I hope everyone understands that they aren’t just generally accessible for all uses. As mentioned in the blog post, they specifically have better color contrast to achieve a contrast of at least 3:1, which is the contrast recommended by WCAG for non-text content.

Read the whole thing. There’s a delicate balancing act between having a complete color scheme and satisfying a variety of needs. It sounds like this theme doesn’t quite cut it, though hopefully there will be some improvements in the future.

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Aggregations and Distinct Counts in Power BI

Phil Seamark doesn’t have time to wait for Power BI to count:

This article aims to show how you can speed up distinct count calculations in Power BI using the built-in user-defined aggregations feature. The user-defined aggregation feature in Power BI is designed to work with direct query models and usually gets used for calculations such as SUM, MIN, MAX etc. However, it can also work well for distinct count calculations using the pattern shown in this article.

It’s an interesting partial aggregation approach which works really well when the distinct count is a small percentage of the total.

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Capabilities (and Limitations) of Power BI Migration Tools

Chris Webb talks tools:

I have so many customers wanting to migrate from legacy BI tools to Power BI. They are concerned that their current BI tool has an uncertain futureLicence renewals are looming and in the current economic climate organisations are looking to save money. Power BI is not only a lot cheaper than other BI tools, it’s a better tool overall and since Microsoft continues to make big investments in it then migration is clearly a no-brainer.

As a Power BI consultancy owner I have a problem though: I don’t have enough skilled people working for me to keep up with all this demand. What’s the answer? I know! Let’s build a tool that can help migrate all these legacy reports to Power BI!

The result is that, so far this year, I’ve seen or heard of five or six different Power BI migration tools built by various consultancies. That’s great and here at Microsoft we’re naturally supportive of our partners and want as many people to use Power BI as possible. I have reservations about some of these tools though, and these reservations fall into two categories.

Read on for Chris’s take on the topic.

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Power BI Dataset Scale-Out

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.

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Working with Power BI Paginated Report Subscriptions

Olivier Van Steenland performs a conversion:

As a first step, I tried to “migrate” an example report from SQL Server Reporting Services to Power BI. In a previous blog post, I described the steps required to migrate successfully. You can find that blog post using the following link: Converting SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports.

In this blog post, I will look at the subscription functionality for Paginated Reports.

Read on for the process, as well as one limitation (and workaround).

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Blank Rows and Limited Relationships in DAX

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari cover the blank row:

We dedicated a previous article to the blank row in DAX. In that article, the goal was to explain the differences between VALUES and DISTINCT. This article here focuses on how important it is to generate the blank row to guarantee that totals are always correct.

The blank row is created for regular relationships that are invalid – that is, when there is at least one row on the many-side that does not have a matching row on the one-side of the regular relationship. The same does not happen for limited relationships, which do not generate a blank row in similar conditions. Therefore, if a model contains a limited invalid relationship, developers must pay extra attention to how they create reports to avoid obtaining inaccurate results.

Read on for an example of what they mean.

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Scheduling a Power BI Premium Backup

Gilbert Quevauvilliers has us synchronize our watches:

In this blog post I am going to detail how to create a schedule, test and confirm that the backup for the Power BI Premium dataset is successfully backed up.

This follows on from my first blog post: Automating the backup of Power BI Premium datasets/databases – Part 1

Read on for a walkthrough of what you need to do in order to create a schedule runbook.

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Organizing Power BI Workspaces

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.

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Dynamic What-Ifs in Power BI

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.

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Handling Balance Sheets in Power BI

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.

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