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Category: Power BI

Finding the Last Refresh Time on Power BI Partitions

Published 2022-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2022-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

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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Seeing Top N in Power BI

Published 2022-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does some filtering:

I have previously written articles about how you can write a measure in DAX that helps with TOP N filtering. However, you may not need that calculation for many situations. If all you want is just simply to get the top 10 customers based on the sales amount, or bottom 5 products, etc, then you can simply use the visual-level filter GUI to perform this filtering. This is not a new functionality in Power BI, However, many users might not have yet seen it, so I’ll explain it in this short article and blog.

Read on to understand when you can use this and when you should go to TOPN() in DAX.

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Automating Table-Level Refresh in Power BI

Published 2022-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres digs into a challenge:

The refresh schedule on the Power BI portal is made at the Dataset level. This means all the tables refresh on the same schedule. Some models may not have a problem with this, but many models will. This article explains how to automate table level refresh in Power BI.

This refresh schedule means you will be creating a bigger workload than you really need compared to a refresh at the table level if it were possible.

There are some options to ignore and work-around this, and there is one option which will require more effort but can solve the problem. This article will analyse these options and go deeper into how to build custom refresh automation solutions.

Read on for a detailed solution.

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Downloading Power BI Reports with Powershell

Published 2022-04-15 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Fletcher needs to get some PBIX files:

In this blog post I will be sharing a PowerShell script that allows multiple Power BI reports to be downloaded at once.

In the Power BI service, there is no way of downloading multiple Power BI reports at once. Therefore, users must download files one by one which is slow, time consuming and inefficient. Thankfully, there are ways around this, one of which is using PowerShell.

Read on for the script and some additional notes.

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Merging ADX Queries in Power BI

Published 2022-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter joins two Azure Data Explorer tables using Power Query:

The merge operation (Table.NestedJoin) is the M language equivalent to creating relationships between tables in the model.

The resulting ADX operation is join.

You can join ADX tables by writing KQL, by using relationships or by merging queries in Power Query.

In this article I’ll show how to use merge in a way that produces efficient KQL queries without the need to write any KQL syntax.

Click through for the process.

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Building a Gantt Chart with Power BI Paginated Reports

Published 2022-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley unlocks one of my guilty pleasures:

A Gantt chart is a running list of activities with the duration for each displayed as a horizontal bar depicting the beginning and ending day along a horizontal scale. The challenge is that this is not a standard chart type in either Power BI or SSRS/Paginated Reports. Furthermore, project planners may prefer to see activities as rows in the format of a printed page, as you can see in this example:

I like Gantt charts more than is probably healthy. Paul shows a method which isn’t exactly easy but it does the trick.

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Mass Column Renaming in Power Query

Published 2022-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Kristi Cantor renames columns en masse:

Recently, we hosted Allision Kennedy on the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. During the course of the conversation, our co-host Thomas LaRock expressed his frustration at the lack of a simple method to complete what should be a simple task in Power Query. In Tom’s example, he explained he wanted to replace a given value within the column names without individually renaming all of the columns. He pointed out that this has been possible in Office for 20+ years but requires learning some M to complete in Power Query due to the fact that column headers are not considered data.

It turns out, however, that there is an answer here. Read on for that answer.

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Paginated-Ish Reports with Excel

Published 2022-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington goes to the bargain bin:

Paginated Reports have been available in Power BI since 2019.  They serve an important purpose, but they are not easy for the average business user to learn, plus they require Power BI Premium to use.  In my blog and video today, I will show you how you can use Excel as a substitute for Paginated Report Builder to build simple paginated reports from your Power BI Desktop data model.

Click through to see how.

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