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Category: Power BI

Calculating Weekdays with M

Published 2022-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna Hughes calculates weekdays on the fly:

Knowing the days between events is a fairly common reporting request because a lot of reporting is created to track SLA’s (service level agreement) and other KPI’s (key performance indicators). While getting the days between two dates is fairly easy to achieve, they tend to follow up and ask how many week days there are between two timed events. For example, one company may have a SLA to ship an order within three week days of the order being placed or else a discount is applied to the order. In this case, I would highly recommend that the company have software that calculates these days in the background and stores the actual week days between order date and ship date in a database. Unfortunately, many companies create policies like this without considering future reporting needs and these values have to be calculated on the backend.

Click through for the code but be sure to read the note that this is all weekdays, including holidays.

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Language Translation via Power BI Field Parameters

Published 2022-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl shows off a great use of Power BI Field Parameters:

The current approaches when it comes to data and value translations are more workarounds than actual solutions. They probably work fine for small data models and very specific use-cases but usually fall short in performance, usability or maintainability when implemented on a larger scale enterprise models.

The recently introduced Field Parameters in Power BI give us a bit more flexibility here and another potential solution to implement data and value translations in Power BI.

Click through for an example which shows data in English, Spanish, and French.

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Using Power BI Field Parameters with Data from Kusto

Published 2022-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter combines Azure Data Explorer and a new feature in Power BI:

Field parameters are a new feature in Power BI as of the May version.

With field parameters you can give the consumer of a report a lot of flexibility about the content of the report, what fields are used in the visuals, what time granularity is used and what measures are displayed.

All this without writing any DAX or M code.

Click through for an example of how this works.

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How It Works: Power BI Field Parameters Edition

Published 2022-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers figures out how field parameters work:

In this blog post I want to give a visual representation as to how field parameters works and what the current limitations are.

It is important to be aware of the limitations so that you do not get caught out later or you are trying to figure out why it is not working.

I do hope my descriptions and pictures below help you understand how it works and when it does not work!

Click through for some detailed graphics and explanation.

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Applying Forecasts with Known Seasonal Behavior in Power BI

Published 2022-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann begins a series on seasonality in Power BI:

Please note, that the monthly variation I am using in this example is taken from an existing table and not derived by statistical methods like the Excel FORECAST.ETS.SEASONALITY function. Here, we simply apply an existing distribution to expected future sales, but I will cover forecasts using those statistical methods in upcoming blogposts.

Todays starting point is a request to calculate how many sales to expect until the end of the year and then distribute the expected sales according to a list of monthly %, which are all different, because there is an expected seasonality in the sales:

Click through to see how this all works.

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End-to-End Analytics with Power BI Datamarts

Published 2022-05-27 by Kevin Feasel

Katy Young explains the value of Power BI datamarts:

A datamart can be thought of as a subject-specific data warehouse, often containing data related to one domain or line of business within an organization. Because datamarts are often aligned to a particular business use case, analysts don’t need to write complex queries over large volumes of data as they would against a more traditional data warehouse. This reduces time to insight for organizations and promotes self-service analytics by making structured data accessible to exactly the people who need it.

Read on for more information.

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Power BI Datamarts

Published 2022-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has a four-parter on datamarts in Power BI. First up is the simple question:

One of the newest additions to the Power BI components is the Datamart. Power BI Datamart is more than just another feature, it is a major milestone where the development of Power BI solutions will be revolutionized based on that. This is a feature that helps both citizen data analysts and developers. In this article and video, I’ll explain what is a Power BI datamart, how it helps you in your Power BI implementation, and why you should use it?

Next up, how do you create one?

In the previous article, you learned what is a Datamart and the use cases of that in a Power BI implementation. In this article and video, you will have your first experience with Datamarts and learn through an example about what it is and how it works in detail. The interesting thing in all the steps below is that you just need a web browser to build the datamart.

Thirdly, we have datamart components:

What is a Power BI Datamart underneath? Can you connect to the database generated by Power BI Datamart? how the Dataset associated with the Datamart can be used? Is there a linage view? In this article and video, I’ll explain These and you will learn about the components of a Power BI Datamart. If you are new to Power BI Datamarts, this article explains what it is and its use cases and this article gets you through the Datamart editor and your first experience with it.

Reza rounds out this series of videos with how datamarts fit into the broader Power BI ecosystem:

Power BI Datamart is integrating well with other components of the Power BI ecosystem (such as workspaces, sharing, deployment pipelines, endorsements, sensitivity labels, etc). In this article and video, I’ll explain how Power BI works with other features and services in Power BI implementation. If you are new to Power BI Datamarts, this article explains what it is and its use cases and this article gets you through the Datamart editor and your first experience with it. You can also learn about the components of the Power BI Datamart from this article.

Click through for four videos hitting the high points.

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Counting Employees by Period with DAX

Published 2022-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington solves a common problem:

I’m calling this article, “How many employees by period”. Staff come and go for different reasons. In some companies, the number of staff can change over time. The principles used in this article can also be used in other instances.  There can be staff moving in and out of departments, on and off of projects, etc. The technique can also be used to work out how many staff were on leave, how many off sick, how many tickets were open in a support queue, or any other concept that has a start and end date in a transactional table.

Read on for Matt’s answer but be sure to check out the comments as there are some other good solutions in there.

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Object-Level Security in Power BI

Published 2022-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb checks out Object-Level Security:

If you have sensitive data in your Power BI dataset you may need to stop some users seeing the data in certain columns or measures. There is only one way to achieve this: you have to use Object Level Security (OLS) in your dataset. It’s not enough to exclude those measures or columns from your reports or to hide them, because there will always be ways for enterprising users to see data they shouldn’t be allowed to see. However the problem with OLS up to now is that it didn’t play nicely with Power BI reports and so you had to create multiple versions of the same report for different security roles. The good news is that there’s now a way to create one report connected to a dataset with OLS and have it display different columns and measures to users with different permissions.

And then watch as Chris combines Row-Level Security with Object-Level Security to make it nicer for users but probably a mess for maintainers.

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