Category: Power BI

Matt Allington throws one in for free:

The May 2022 version of Power BI Desktop includes a very interesting and useful feature – Field Parameters. Today I will show you how to use this new feature illustrating with 3 (no, wait, 4) use cases – Chart Elements, Chart Axis, Table Contents and Permanent Ad hoc Hierarchies.

Read on to see how to use this preview feature in Power BI.

Melissa Coates takes us through tenant settings management in the Power BI Service:

The tenant settings in the admin portal of the Power BI Service are incredibly important. The tenant settings include a wide-ranging number of things that significantly affect the user experience. It’s really important to manage the tenant settings effectively.In this post I’m going to talk about the process you should go through for reviewing and specifying your tenant settings.

The following is a high-level overview of what’s involved:

Read on for a helpful image as well as a flow of what to think about before you act.

Kristyna Hughes makes use of the Tabular Object Model:

Power BI hierarchies are a powerful and easy way to enable end users to dig deeper into their visuals and data. While hierarchies can be a useful resource for self-serve analytics, maintaining hierarchies can be a pain as new levels get added or removed. Thankfully, if you have Power BI premium you can use the XMLA endpoint to add code into existing .NET applications to dynamically add or remove levels from hierarchies as they are created/removed in your application.

Unfortunately, while we can manipulate, add, and delete hierarchies and their levels, visuals already containing the hierarchy will not be automatically adjusted with any new levels/ordinals.

In spite of that limitation, click through to check out what you can do.

Imke Feldmann doesn’t want you to leave empty-handed:

When your query returns an error, sometimes it could make sense to return an empty table instead of a simple error message. And ideally, this table has the same columns and types than the table that would have been returned without the error. Check out Chris Webbs article about it here: Chris Webb’s BI Blog: Handling Data Source Errors In Power Query Chris Webb’s BI Blog (crossjoin.co.uk)

Read on for a function which generates an empty replica table based on some other table.

Gilbert Quevauvilliers builds a report with daily alerts:

I was actually working on my own version of the Known Issues Power BI report, when the Power BI team released their blog post New Power BI Known Issue page | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

In the steps below I am going to show you the report I created, and then how I configured it to alert me when there are updates to new known issues.

I also subscribed to this report on a daily basis, this allows me to quickly and easily be aware of any known issues in Power BI.

Read on to see how Gilbert did this and click through for a copy of the report for your own purposes.

Gauri Mahajan loads Cosmos DB data into Power BI:

As we are going to report Cosmos DB data with Power BI, the two items we need in place are a Cosmos DB instance and well as an installation of Power BI. It is assumed that an instance of Cosmos DB – SQL API is already created with some sample data. It is also assumed that the latest version of Power BI Desktop is already installed on the local machine. One can create some sample data using the built-in scripts in a Cosmos DB instance. One can explore the data using the Data Explorer on the dashboard of the Cosmos DB instance as shown below.

Read on for the process. Stories like this are why I discount the ability of document databases to change fluidly from one document to the next—as soon as you want to analyze things across documents, you suddenly need schema and structure.