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Category: Power BI

Sharing Power BI Content outside the Organization

Published 2022-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira wants to share some data:

I am seeing more and more customers trying to use Premium capabilities to create data products that they can incorporate as part of their main product offering. This kind of reporting as a product solution will add a lot more value to their main product, so I can see why this is becoming quite trendy.

However, it became obvious that the current documentation can be a bit overwhelming and confusing at first.

So I decided to compile the process of sharing content outside of your organisation in a blog post. Happy days!

Click through to see how to share within the Power BI Service.

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Power BI Desktop August 2022 Updates

Published 2022-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington looks at some recent updates to Power BI:

I’ve been pretty busy over the last few months. The demand for Power BI skills has never been stronger, and my company is super busy. I haven’t written a blog article for a while, but I wanted to take a bit of time out this morning to talk about the August 2022 update to Power BI Desktop. As Power BI matures, there is less and less to get excited about with a new release of Desktop, but there were a couple of things that caught my eye in this release, worthy of calling out.

Read on for a couple of quality of life improvements.

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Finding Guidance on Power BI

Published 2022-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra puts together a compendium:

Recently there has been a number of great articles published on Power BI that I wanted to make you aware of that go beyond the features descriptions found in the Power BI documentation. These new articles fall under the Power BI guidance documentation and are designed to address common strategic patterns.  Below is my summary of the articles, and check out Power BI guidance from the CAT by Matthew Roach for a more detailed summary.

If you’re interested in Power BI administration and strategic deployment, there’s a lot of good information here.

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Multi-Developer Power BI Development

Published 2022-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad architects a solution for multiple developers working on a Power BI project:

Before I start explaining the architecture, it is important to understand the challenge and think about how to solve it. The default usage of Power BI involves getting data imported into the Power BI data model and then visualizing it. Although there are other modes and other connection types, however, the import data is the most popular option. However, there are some challenges in a model and a PBIX file with everything in one file. Here are some;

– Multiple developers cannot work on one PBIX file at the same time. Multi-Developer issue.

– Integrating the single PBIX file with another application or dataset would be very hard. High Maintenance issue.

– All data transformations are happening inside the model, and the refresh time would be slower.

– The only way to expand visualization would be by adding pages to the model, and you will end up with hundreds of pages after some time.

– Every change, even a small change in the visualization, means deploying the entire model.

– Creating a separate Power BI file with some parts it referencing from this model would not be possible; as a result, you would need to make a lot of duplicates and high maintenance issues again.

– If you want to re-use some of the tables and calculations of this file in other files in the future, it won’t be easy to maintain when everything is in one file.

– And many other issues.

After laying out all of the challenges, Reza puts together a plan to resolve them.

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Power BI Enhanced Refresh API and Custom Connectors

Published 2022-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb starts a new series:

I love the new Power BI Enhanced Refresh API: it allows you to do things like refresh individual tables in your dataset, override incremental refresh policies, control the amount of parallelism, cancel refreshes and a lot more, while being easier to use than the XMLA Endpoint. However, like the XMLA Endpoint, one problem remains: how can you schedule a dataset refresh using it? One option is to create a custom connector for Power Automate (similar to what I described here for the Export API, before the Power BI export actions for Power Automate had been released): this not only allows you to schedule more complex refreshes but also gives you more flexibility over scheduling and do things like send emails if refreshes fail.

Read on for a link to an in-depth guide on creating a custom connector as well as a few notes on the topic.

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From Azure Data Explorer to Excel

Published 2022-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter views data in Excel:

In a previous article Direct Query from Excel to Azure Data Explorer (microsoft.com) I described a way to mimic Direct Query access ala Power BI in Excel.

The method used in this article that allows the user to filter the imported data using values entered into cells in the grid.

In this article I would like to describe a way to really query Kusto data in real time without importing any data and without any volume limitations.

Read on to see how, though there’s a pretty big intermediate step.

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Power BI Dataflows and On-Prem Data Gateways

Published 2022-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld keeps getting pulled back in:

Another week, another challenge! Summer holidays is the perfect time to run into challenges that you normally would not encounter or simply do not know about because they are fixed before you know. This blog will elaborate on a case I had at a client, where we run into issues with the on-premises data gateway in Power BI and in particular related to building dataflows based on sources that connect via the gateway.

Read on for the problem as well as Marc’s solution.

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Showing Filter Selections on Power BI Reports

Published 2022-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira makes a Power BI breadcrumb:

When I’m developing reports, I’m asked multiple times to “hide” the slicers/filters from the report page. Usually this is to make space in the page for other visuals and because customers don’t want to use the filter pane for some reason.

This happened so many times, and only in the last couple of months I decided to try some things out and get a bit creative with Power BI.

I came up with two solutions, which I think work great in these scenarios.

Read on to see the solutions.

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Power BI CAT Guidance

Published 2022-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche advises customers:

I’ve written previously about some of what the Power BI CAT team does, but the Power BI guidance documentation only gets a passing mention… and it’s worth going into more deeply.

A lot of what the Power BI CAT team does involves working with large enterprise customers. These customers are often trying to achieve difficult goals that often involve complex data architectures, and Power BI is often a significant part of their end-to-end information supply chain. We get involved when these enterprise customers need help achieving their strategic goals, and this help often includes helping them effectively use the existing capabilities of Power BI.

Read on to learn more about this guidance documentation.

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