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Category: Power BI

Sharing Individual Power BI Dataflows

Marc Lelijveld is in a sharing mood:

Recently, I have had a challenge at a customer, where a central teams maintains many dataflows in Power BI, to store their only and single version of the truth. However, this central team maintained many different dataflows in a single workspace, but did not want to share the entire workspace with others. What now? How can they share a single dataflows in Power BI?

In this blog, I will describe different ways to share dataflows in the Power BI service and highlight pros and cons of each solution. Read on to find out what options you have, and what my personal preference would be.

Read on to learn why you might want to share a dataflow, as well as four techniques to do it.

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A Power BI Report for Power BI Report Access

Gilbert Quevauvilliers sets up an infinite loop:

In this blog post I show the final part which is how I created the Power BI report which takes the previous 3 steps and then creates the Power BI Report.

I am going to show you how I got the data in using Power Query and then created the Power BI report.

Read on for the process. But now I want a report to see who has access to the report for who has access to reports. And I think I need a report for that layer. And that layer. And…

(Shh, yes, I know you can get that all from the same report but it’s so rare I get to make a “Turtles the whole way down” reference).

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Calculations in DAX with CALCULATE()

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain one of the most important DAX functions:

CALCULATE, with its companion function CALCULATETABLE, is the only function in DAX that can change the filter context. Its use is very intuitive at first, and most DAX developers start using CALCULATE without knowing the most intricate details of its behavior. Then, sooner than later the use of CALCULATE becomes frightening because CALCULATE starts to misbehave. When this happens, it is nothing but a signal that you need to learn more theory and deepen your understanding of the behavior of CALCULATE.

In this article, we do not introduce the most complex behaviors of CALCULATE. Instead, we provide a beginner’s guide to CALCULATE, and we try to avoid making things simpler than they are. CALCULATE is definitely a complex function. Here we introduce its base behaviors, with a solid theoretical foundation.

Definitely a must-read if you work with Power BI and don’t have CALCULATE() down pat.

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Dynamic M Parameters now GA

Dany Hoter shows off dynamic M parameters in Power BI:

The user is creating an application in which he wants to embed Power BI.

The same Power BI report will be used in different contexts and the user wanted to have a different header each time and to provide the header as part of the URL.

There may be other ways to solve this problem(?) but as the solution was already using ADX, the user came with a way that involves Direct Query and a dynamic parameter to solve the dynamic header.

Click through to see how to solve this problem.

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Thin Reports in Power BI

Soheil Bakhshi’s reports get the Kate Moss treatment:

Shared Datasets have been around for quite a while now. In June 2019, Microsoft announced a new feature called Shared and Certified Datasets with the mindset of supporting enterprise-grade BI within the Power BI ecosystem. In essence, the shared dataset feature allows organisations to have a single source of truth across the organisation serving many reports.

Thin Report is a report that connects to an existing dataset on Power BI Service using the Connect Live connectivity mode. So, we basically have multiple reports connected to a single dataset. Now that we know what a thin report is, let’s see why it is best practice to follow this approach.

Read on for Soheil’s thoughts on the topic and a tutorial on how to create a thin report.

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Diagnostics ID and ActivityID in Power Query

Chris Webb looks into activity IDs:

I was looking at the output of Power Query’s Query Diagnostics feature recently (again) and trying to understand it better. One of the more confusing aspects of it is the way that the Power Query engine may evaluate a query more than once during a single refresh. This is documented in the note halfway down this page, which says:

Jorge’s comment on the post adds even more context around what the ID Chris comes up with actually means.

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Viridis Color Palettes in Power BI

Meagan Longoria shares a few themes:

I am a fan of the viridis color palettes available in python and R, so I decided to make Power BI theme files for each of the 4 color maps (viridis, inferno, magma, plasma). These color palettes are not only lovely to look at, they are colorblind/CVD friendly and perceptually uniform (or close to it).

The screenshots below show the colors you’ll get when you use my theme files.

Click through to get the theme files and some additional advice from Meagan in the GitHub repo itself.

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Finding the Last Refresh Time on Power BI Partitions

Dennes Torres has written a tool:

On the article Automating table refresh in Power BI I explained many methods to automate refresh of individual objects, which could be tables or partitions.

This creates the need of good ways to visualize the last refresh date and time for each partition and table. The portal shows the refresh date/time for the entire dataset, we can’t identify on the Power BI portal the exactly date for each table last refresh.

Read on for a link to the refresh code and an example of it in action.

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Rounding Differences in Power BI

Marco Russo explains the importance of data types for rounding in Power BI:

In one of the last classrooms I delivered, students were wondering why the results of their formulas were close but not identical to the proposed solution. We quickly identified the problem being an issue of data type conversion already covered in Understanding numeric data type conversions in DAX. However, the issue is interesting as a simpler example to show that different DAX calculations can produce different results because of a different way of rounding numbers!

Read on for Marco’s example.

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Subscribing to Power BI Reports

Reza Rad looks at e-mail subscriptions of Power BI reports:

Have you ever wondered is it possible to have updates of the Power BI report to be emailed to you (or some other colleagues) on a daily basis? Power BI, fortunately, has this feature, it is called Subscription. Subscriptions are helpful ways to send an up-to-date version of the report and dashboard to the users’ email addresses on a scheduled basis. In this article and video, I’ll explain what a subscription is and how it works in Power BI.

Click through for the video and complete blog post.

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