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Category: Power BI

Using ConcatenateX in Power BI

Published 2021-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Reza 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.

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Dynamic Column Rename in Power BI with XMLA and TOM

Published 2021-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna 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.

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Enabling the Single Value Slicer Option in Power BI

Published 2021-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Marco 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.

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Backing UP Power BI Premium—Couldn’t Connect to Azure

Published 2021-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert 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.

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Show Data as Table and Security

Published 2021-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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?”

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Combining Multiple Header Rows with Power Query

Published 2021-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil 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.

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Backing Up a Power BI Premium Database

Published 2021-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants you to back that thing up:

Continuing with my series of using Power BI Premium Per User (PPU), today I am going to show you how to back up your PPU database.

As far as I am aware all the options below will work for Power BI Premium as well.

To me this is critical when my dataset size grows. Especially when it takes multiple days to process all the data into the required partitions.

Not only is having a backup best practice, if something must go wrong with a deployment (let’s say I wipe out the partitions by mistake) it will be quick and easy to restore from a backup.

Read the whole thing.

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Showing Count of Selected Items in a Slicer

Published 2021-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasani wants to track slicer counts:

In one of the projects, I was working on, I received feedback saying it is hard to understand how many items they have selected in a slicer, and it is not the first time I came across this. It is a valid point, especially when you have quite a few items in a slicer, you use a search bar to look for items, you select a couple, but you were not sure how many were selected.

Read on for a rather clever solution to the problem.

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Automating Single Table Refresh with Azure Data Factory and Azure Automation

Published 2021-10-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld wants to refresh a single table:

Back in February, I wrote a blog on how you can trigger a single table to refresh in your Power BI data model. This blog described how you can achieve this goal using a PowerShell script and the ASCmd cmdlets for Analysis Services, which also works for Power BI Premium. In the wrap-up of that blog, I promised to follow-up with a blog on how to achieve the same goal with Azure Data Factory. It took a little bit longer than expected to finalize this post, but here it is!

In this blog, co-authored by my colleague Paulien van Eijk, we will describe how you can automate your single table refresh in the Power BI Service, including all dependencies with downstream dataflows using Azure Data Factory and Azure Automation. All this is based on real life scenarios and a solution build in collaboration between Dave Ruijter, Paulien and me.

Read on for Marc and Paulien’s solution.

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