A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Meagan Longoria looks at some helpful new icons in Power BI’s Selection pane:
If you’ve visited the Tab order area of the Selection Pane in Power BI in the last couple of months, you might have noticed some new buttons.
Click through to see the three functions in action.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers thinks about documentation:
One thing that often happens is when users are using a dataset, they want to know which measures are available. And not only that sometimes they want to know the measure definition.
This got me thinking and how best could I give this to the users in my organization to be able to find this information quickly and easily.
In the past this was a manual effort not only to export the measures, but also to maintain a document, so that as measures are added, updated, or deleted I would then need to manually update some document.
Yep, you guessed it I created a Power BI report which has got all the measures and their measure definitions, which will update with the dataset! And I show you how I did this below.
Click through to see how.sfff
Comments closedSebastian Cattes continues a series on using Pydantic:
In part 1 of the article we learned about dynamic typing, Pydantic and decorators.
In this part we will learn how to combine these concepts for Pandas DataFrame validation in our codebase.
1. Combining Decorators, Pydantic and Pandas – Combine section 2. and 3. of Part 1 to showcase how to use them for output validation.
2. Let’s define ourselves a proper spaceship!
3. Summary
Check out both parts of the article.
Comments closedReza Rad shows off a new connector:
Power BI can get data from Google Sheet now. This functionality is released just yesterday and announced in both Power BI and Power Query blogs. The feature is still preview (Beta) but it is worthwhile looking at how it works in a quick article and video.
There are several steps involved but it’s still a lot simpler than the old method of parsing a website, especially if you had any sort of security on the spreadsheets.
Comments closedReza Rad describes a DAX function:
It happens often in Power BI calculations and reports that you need to concatenate a list of values from a column. You can do this concatenation in Power Query or DAX. However, if the concatenation needs to be done dynamically. ConcatenateX is a very helpful DAX function to achieve such results. It is very helpful to understand what happens in the virtual tables in DAX too. In this article and video, I’ll explain what ConcatenateX is and how it works in Power BI and DAX.
Click through for a video, as well as a detailed explanation in blog post format.
Comments closedKristyna Hughes solves a problem:
For the TOM and XMLA experts, imagine this. Your customer wants to dynamically rename columns without using the Power BI Desktop and would prefer all existing report visuals not get broken by the new name. Impossible? Not with TOM, XMLA, and translations within Power BI.
If you’ve ever tried to change a column name in a Power BI source, you’ve likely run into this error on any visuals that contained the renamed column. And when you hit that “See Details”, it will tell you the column that you simply renamed is no longer available for your visual.
So how do we get around that?
Read on to see how.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari hack the Gibson:
You cannot apply the same behavior to a column of a table you created or imported by using Power BI. However, Tabular Editor is your key to unlocking this feature. The article shows the user interface of the free version of Tabular Editor; the steps required are identical in the commercial version of Tabular Editor.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The properties modifications suggested in the following description are not supported by Microsoft. You apply these changes at your own risk. You should always create a backup of the Power BI file before modifying it.
I’m pretty sure a disclaimer like that just makes me want to do it all the more.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers troubleshoots an error:
What I did learn when working through the blog post is that I ran into some errors when trying to re-connect or trying to connect to the Azure Storage in my Premium App Workspace and it failed.
The errors that I got were, “We couldn’t connect to Azure, but it’s likely temporary. Try again later or see details.”
Read on for the cause and the solution.
Comments closedChris Webb explains that hiding a column isn’t the same thing as preventing access to a column:
In the last few months the following issue has been escalated up to the Power BI CAT team several times: customers have deployed reports into production and then found that users are able to see data they should not be allowed to see by using the “Show data point as a table” feature. The question is: is this a security hole? It isn’t, and in this blog post I’ll explain why and how you should think about security as something that happens on the dataset and not in the report.
My official response is “Hmm…” I don’t disagree with Chris, but I do understand how people might not know this and get blindsided because they think they’ve prevented someone from seeing a sensitive column. I think part of my reaction is that this functionality isn’t blaringly obvious to report developers, and so there’s a little bit of “How could you know this could happen?”
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi has (sometimes) three header rows for the price of one:
Easy!
Hmm… Not really. Especially when we have multiple other Excel files; some have two, some have three rows of comments, and some have even more. So not only is the task time-consuming, but it also is pretty boring and prone to human errors. What if there is a custom function that I can invoke to get the job done?
Click through for one method, followed by the proper method.
Comments closed