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Category: Power BI

Power BI Workspace Permissions

Published 2022-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld continues a series on Power BI workspace configuration:

After Power BI Workspace setup – part 1, which was mainly about creating your workspace, giving it the right name etcetera, this blog will elaborate on workspace permissions. If you did not read part 1 yet, I encourage you to start at that blog to get the basic setup in place.

You might think, permissions is an easy topic, but often underestimated! In this blog I will describe the different workspace roles, and how you can apply them in your project. Also we will look at sharing specific content from a workspace perspective, such as sharing dataflows.

Read on to learn more.

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A Free Power BI Sandbox

Published 2022-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has the right price in mind:

A question I often get from many students is: “How can I practice Power BI service features if I do not have a Power BI Account?”. Not having a Power BI account can happen because of many scenarios; your company might close this option so that the process be only channeled through a specific process within the company. Or you may not have the permission to do so. Not having an account makes it difficult to practice Power BI Service options such as workspace, datasets, dashboards, dataflows, apps, and many other features. On the other hand, even if you have the Power BI Service account, in most of the organizations, you are not the service administrator, so you cannot practice tenant-settings configurations in the service.

Fortunately, there is a way to create your own Power BI sandbox; which means an environment just for yourself, with 25 accounts. You will be the administrator of your environment. The environment will be up for at least 90 days, and you can practice whatever you want for the Power BI service there. The best of all, it is FREE. You don’t have to pay a cent for it. Credit card detail is not needed. What better you could wish for?

Read on to see how.

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Reviewing Power BI Query Sessions with Log Analytics

Published 2022-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series on Power BI monitoring:

In my last post I showed how to use Log Analytics data to analyse Power BI query activity. The problem with looking at a long list of queries, though, is that it can be overwhelming and it can be hard to get a sense of when users were and weren’t actively interacting with a report. In this post I’ll show you how you can write a KQL query that gives you a summary view that solves this problem by grouping queries into sessions.

Click through to see what Chris means by the term “session” and for the KQL to do the job.

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Using the Power BI Embedded Playground

Published 2022-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows off the Power BI Embedded Playground:

One of the great things about Power BI is how they make things a lot easier and better to use.

I have been answering some questions in the Power BI Community and other people have been looking into using Power BI Embedded.

This led me to find out that there is a quick and easy way to test out Power BI Embedded. The best part is that I can use my own reports and do a drag and drop test!

Click through to see how.

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Writing DAX for Paginated Reports

Published 2022-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Aspin shows us how to use DAX functions in Power BI paginated reports:

In the previous articles, you learned – or revised – the basics of using DAX as the query language to populate paginated reports with data from Power BI datasets. However, as befitted an introduction, the focus was essentially on getting up and running. Specifically, the only DAX table function you looked at was SUMMARIZECOLUMNS().

Despite its undeniable usefulness, this function is far from the only DAX function that you can use to query Power BI Datasets when creating Paginated Reports. Moreover, it has limitations when you wish to deliver complete lists of results as it is an aggregation function. This means, for instance, that you will never find duplicate records in the tabular output from SUMMARIZECOLUMNS() as, by default, it is grouping data. Alternatively, if you wish to use SUMMARIZECOLUMNS() to output data at its most granular level, you will need to include a unique field (or a combination of fields that guarantee uniqueness) – even if these are not used in the report output.

It follows that, to extract data in ways that allow effective report creation, it is essential to learn to use a whole range of DAX table functions. 

Click through for a list of functions and how to use them.

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Monitoring Power BI Queries with Log Analytics

Published 2022-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series on using Log Analytics:

It’s actually very easy to build a simple KQL query to look at query activity on your datasets: you just need to look at the QueryEnd event (or operation, as its called in Log Analytics), which is fired when a query finishes running. This event gives you all the information you need: the type of query (DAX or MDX), the duration, the CPU time, the query text and so on. The main challenge is that while you also get the IDs of the report and visual that generated the query, you don’t get the names of the report or visual. I wrote about how to get a list of visual and report IDs here and here, but how can you use that information?

Read on to see how.

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Page and Bookmark Navigation in Power BI

Published 2022-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kristi Cantor notes a Power BI update:

Hello P3 Adaptive Nation! Happy New Year, ring out the old and ring in the new! Speaking of ringing in the new, with all the hustle and bustle associated with the holiday season and the excitement of welcoming the new year, did anybody happen to notice the new feature quietly rolled out in Power Bi back in November to take the edge off creating and maintaining custom pages and bookmarks? 

Read on to see what has changed.

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The Power BI Icon Map Custom Visual

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Alice Drummond shows off a custom visual in Power BI:

Working across the environmental industry – it’s fair to say that pretty much ALL of DiscoverEI’s Power BI reports have a map! And if you thought that MapBox was good, well you’re going to LOVE the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI – which allows you to display interactive polygons, points, lines and of course – icons, all in the one visual…plus so much more!

We’ve been using the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI for the last couple of years and it’s safe to say that it is hands down our favourite mapping visual for Power BI! This visual is created for free for the community by James Dales. James is always making updates and enhancements to the visual so the best place to get the latest version and some helpful instructions and tips on how to use it is from his dedicated website: https://icon-map.com/index.html. And while you’re there remember to shout James a coffee or 10 to say thanks for creating such a fantastic mapping visual

Click through for a few examples of the visual and be sure to check it out in the link above.

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Setting up a Power BI Workspace

Published 2022-01-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has a new two-parter:

Time for a more governance related blog this time. It will be a series of two blogs, where in this first part, I will elaborate on the overall setup of your Power BI workspace and naming. The second part will continue about workspace permissions, sharing and ownership. I feel this is a wide topic and therefore deserves a separate blog.

In this part, focus on the overall setup of workspaces. In my work at various clients, I regularly encounter situations where there is a lot of confusion around workspaces, the scope of a workspace, audience and naming. A blog not only for Power BI tenant administrators, but also for passionate Power BI content creators to better understand each other’s standpoints.

Click through for part one and stay tuned for part two.

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