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Category: Power BI

Getting Status of Power BI Enhanced Refreshes

Chris Webb wants to know the situation, STAT:

So far in this series (see part 1part 2 and part 3) I’ve looked at how you can create a Power Automate custom connector that uses the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API to kick off a dataset refresh. That’s only half the story though: once the refresh has been started you need to know if it has finished and, if so, whether it finished successfully or not. In this post I’ll show how to do this.

Read on to see how.

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Allow Azure AD B2B Users to Access Power BI Reports

Gilbert Quevauvilliers provides access:

I was recently doing some testing and when I went to share a Power BI report with an external (B2B) user I could not initially find out how to do this.

NOTE: I had already created my External (B2B) users, you can follow this guide below if you still need to create the external (B2B) users: Distribute content to external guest users with Azure AD B2B – Power BI | Microsoft Docs

I thought it would be good to share the steps on how I achieved this below.

Read on to see how. Also check out the insightful question in the comments section.

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DAX Studio 3 Released

Marco Russo has an announcement:

DAX Studio 3 was released today.

This new, major version offers a new user interface and user experience, providing a modern look and feel without losing any of the features available in previous versions. On the contrary, in DAX Studio 3, many features that were harder to reach in the past are now more visible and easier to use.

The cost of implementing a complete overhaul for a product’s user interface is typically high, but at the same time, this overhaul does not provide new features compared to previous versions. So why bother about the user interface while the product is free and open-source?

Read on to see what those changes look like.

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DAX EvaluateAndLog()

Chris Webb is excited:

I think this is the most exciting thing to happen in DAX since the introduction of variables. Why? Well we all know that writing DAX can be hard, and part of why it’s hard is that it’s hard to debug.

Read on to see how EvaluateAndLog() makes life easier, as well as a couple links to Jeffrey Wang’s blog for further detail.

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Data-Driven Report Subscriptions with Power Automate

Dan English puts together a workflow:

Being able to do a data driven report subscription with Power BI and Paginated reports is a common request we hear from many customers. Let’s say you want to send a PDF version of a report to each of your store or department managers using a set of parameter values specific to each person. In the Power BI service that is not an option, but using Power Automate you can do this.

In this post I will be using a Paginated report that is referencing data in an Azure Analysis Services database and I will be referencing an Excel file that I have in OneDrive for Business which includes the needed information for the data driven subscription with 2000 records. The Paginated report is in a workspace backed by a Power BI Embedded A-SKU (A4 – equivalent of a P1 SKU) for testing purposes and the AAS tier is an S1 (100 QPU).

Read on to see how.

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Incremental Refresh Parameters in Power BI

Chris Webb continues a series on using Power Automate to call the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API:

If you’ve read part 1 or part 2 of this series you’ll know how you can create a Power Automate custom connector to call the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API and get fine-grained control over your refreshes. In this post I will take a look at the two parameters in the Enhanced Refresh API for datasets that use incremental refresh: applyRefreshPolicy and effectiveDate. They are documented here but, as always, some worked examples are helpful to really understand how they work.

Click through to see how these parameters work.

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Power BI Field Parameters and None Options

Barney Lawrence votes None of the Above:


Field Parameters
 are one of my favourite recent additions to Power BI. The ability to turn a single chart into potentially dozens changes the way we think about putting variations of visuals on the page. It was a real wow moment for a client recently when I showed how field parameters for 5 fields and 5 measures could produce a single report page that replaced 25 of their existing reports.

While they theoretically don’t allow you to do much that you couldn’t previously with a disconnected slicer and a lot of DAX they build it faster and without the need to get heavily in to coding DAX. Anything that lowers the difficulty bar for users trying to make the most out of Power BI is a good thing in my book.

There are a couple of issues Barney has with them as they stand now but there are workarounds.

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Embedding Power BI into PowerPoint

Matt Allington integrates a Power BI report into PowerPoint:

I first blogged about this back in October 2021 when Microsoft announced live Power BI embedding was coming to PowerPoint. Believe it or not, the ability to embed Power Pivot reports into PowerPoint was one of the first features delivered by Microsoft way back in 2014 or 2015. It used to be possible with the first release of Power Pivot for Excel and SharePoint Enterprise Edition. Sometime after releasing this feature, Microsoft refocussed its efforts away from Power Pivot/SharePoint Enterprise and started to re-build again from scratch as a new standalone BI app known to us today as Power BI. It then took another 7 years for this PowerPoint feature to be returned. It’s here now, so let me cover what it is and how you can use it.

I’d joke about how much of an atrocity this is but it really isn’t. Thinking about how many meetings get derailed by the person trying to leave PowerPoint, struggling to open another application, having things fall apart, and then going back to the slide deck (inevitably from the beginning rather than the current slide), this is a good idea.

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