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Category: Power BI

Enabling Modern Styles on Old Power BI Reports

Published 2021-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi saves us some time:

I see some developers really hate the old style of the visuals when they have to work on an old report and it makes them crazy to see that the visuals style remains the same even if they create a new report page and add new visuals to the page. So some developers go through a lot of pain to get the visuals to work in the modern style. I even know some developers copied all queries from Power Query from the old report and pasted them to a new Power BI file. Then they used Tabular Editor to copy the tabular objects from the old report to the new one. And some even started to build everything from scratch. If you are one of those developers, be aware that there is a simple setting that can help to quickly switch all the old visuals to their new modern style.

Read on to learn which setting that is.

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Connecting to REST APIs via OAuth2 in Power BI

Published 2021-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has an answer, but you may not like it:

There are a lot of articles and blog posts out there on how to handle OAuth2 authentication when connecting to REST APIs from Power Query in Power BI. However there is also a lot of confusion and contradictory information too so in this post I want to give you the definitive, Microsoft-endorsed answer to this question, which is:

If want to connect from Power BI to a REST API that uses OAuth2 authentication then you need to build a custom connector.

Read on for documentation showing how to implement and the big risk you’re taking if you don’t use a custom connector.

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Paginated Reports in Power BI

Published 2021-08-27 by Kevin Feasel

Elayne Jones dives into paginated reports in Power BI:

Paginated Reports for Power BI offer pixel-perfect control over the format of each element of a report. They allow users to fine-tune each field of the report, such as text size, colors, spacing, and print layout, in a more precise way than using regular visuals in Power BI Desktop. Users can access Paginated Reports directly from workspaces in Power BI Service. Additionally, users can embed Paginated Reports directly onto a Power BI report page with the new visual option. This article will explain how to create a Paginated Report and how to configure the new Paginated Reports visual in Power BI Desktop. Please note that Paginated Reports require a Premium subscription. This tutorial is based on a fictional Sales Report.

If you’re familiar with SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll find Power BI paginated reports simultaneously comfortable and confining—it’s much the same functionality as SSRS, but doesn’t feel as complete.

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Improving Dataset Refresh with Query Folding and the Dataflows Connector

Published 2021-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a performance tip for us:

You may have noticed that a new dataflows connector was announced in the August 2021 release of Power BI Desktop, and that it now supports query folding between a dataset and a dataflow – which you may be surprised to learn was not possible before. In this post I thought I’d take a look at how much of an improvement in performance this can make to dataset refresh performance.

Click through for the demonstration.

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Power BI Cleaner Gen2

Published 2021-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann has an update to the Power BI Cleaner:

In this post I’m sharing a new version of my Power BI Cleaner tool. Besides from some bug fixes it can now automatically identify and analyze reports that are connected to an Analysis Services Model in tabular mode.

Just a warning that the live connections to Analysis Service or shared Power BI dataset might be slow, as Power Query will retrieve the data from all datasets that are available for your from the service. I might include a feature to pre-select datasets in a future release if there is interest. So please add comments if you want to see this feature.

Read on to see how to set everything up, as well as the things you can do with it.

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Power BI Push Tools

Published 2021-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo announces a new set of tools:

Power BI Push Tools is a set of open-source tools to work with Power BI push datasets.

Read Implementing real-time updates in Power BI using push datasets instead of DirectQuery to learn the architecture of solutions based on push datasets and how to create and populate a push dataset starting from a regular Tabular model.

In addition to reading that linked post, click through to see the three tools which are currently available.

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Renaming Multiple Columns at Once in Power BI

Published 2021-08-19 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington wants to change a bunch of column names at once with Power BI:

This is not the first time I have shared this concept.  In my previous article I showed how it is possible to add a prefix to every column in a table. This article today is slightly different. Today I am removing text from multiple columns all at once using some M code. The trick you need to learn to solve this problem is “how to create a list of lists”.

Click through for a video to see it in action.

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Comparing Azure Analysis Services and Power BI PPU on Cost

Published 2021-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers hits on an important factor:

One of the most important aspects when looking to migrate from AAS to PPU is what will costs be. This plays an important part in the decision.

In this blog post instead of doing an AAS and PPU comparison I am going to do this side by side, which I feel will make it easier to compare.

In my opinion it is only fair to compare the same sizing between AAS and PPU, and this can only be done by using the Memory allocation.

Click through for the analysis.

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Using Power BI Goals to Drive OKRs

Published 2021-08-17 by Kevin Feasel

Treb Gatte has an interesting use case for Power BI Goals:

OKRs are but one of three emergent usage scenarios for Power BI Goals. I see some companies using Goals for Metric Aggregation and some for Balanced Scorecards. This post focuses on OKRs as I see the scenario offering broader benefits to the entire organization. OKRs are critical to creating an Action-centric culture.

Read on to understand what an OKR is and how Power BI Goals can help with tracking them.

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