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Category: Power BI

Forcing Color Scheme by Data Element

Reza Rad forces a particular color scheme in Power BI:

You can set the color in every visual in Power BI easily. You can also set the color of multiple visuals at the same time using Themes. However, what if you want to set the same color for the same data point? For example, You want the Gender Female to be always colored Orange in all the charts and visuals. In Power BI, as of now, you cannot set a data point color. However, there is an easy solution for that, which I explained in this article and video.

Click through for the answer. Generally I’d say something along the lines of “instead of doing this, just have one color and take advantage of cross-filtering to highlight the element people care about.” But if you do have a multi-measure categorical set with a small number of categories, color can be a differentiator and at least this helps you keep consistent colors across visuals.

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Power BI Field Parameters

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.

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Managing Power BI Tenant Settings

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.

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Adding Dynamic Hierarchies in Power BI

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.

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Returning an Empty Table in Power Query

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.

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Reviewing the Gartner BI Magic Quadrant

Matt Allington takes a look:

I update this blog article regularly to keep track of how Microsoft is progressing on its strategic journey in building a world class BI platform.  Gartner released the 2022 magic quadrant for Business Intelligence in March 2022.  As expected (by me at least), Microsoft is continuing its trail blazing and has maintained a clear lead over the other contenders in both ability to execute and completeness of vision.  I first wrote this blog article in 2019 to show the trend over time. Since then, I have been collecting the new Gartner magic quadrant images and I have combined them all (2015 – 2022) into an animated gif file (see below).   The visualisation was built using Power BI (what else) so it is very easy to see the changing nature of the competitive environment.  Note that Microsoft started behind back in 2015, and arguably hit the lead in 2018.

Also check out Matt’s video on how to translate spatial values to numbers so Power BI can plot them.

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Generating a Report for Known Issues in Power BI

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.

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Reading Cosmos DB Data into Power BI

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.

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Downloading a Report Authored in Browser as PBIX

James Bartlett solves a tricky problem:

Most of you have probably run into a situation where someone in your organization has authored a report in the Power BI web service, and now they want to make changes that can only be done with Power BI Desktop. So, you try to download the PBIX file from the Power BI web service, only to discover that you can’t, because if it wasn’t created as a PBIX, it can’t be downloaded as a PBIX. Infuriating!

Read on for a solution as well as a Powershell function to make it easier.

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