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Category: Power BI

Type 1 SCDs in Power BI

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi grabs some Excel data from SharePoint:

We have a retail company selling products. The company releases the list of products in Excel format, including list price and dealer price, every year. The product list is released on the first day of July when the financial year starts. We have to implement a Power BI solution that keeps the latest product data to analyse the sales transactions. The following image shows the Product list for 2013:

So each year, we receive a similar Excel file to the above image. The files are stored on a SharePoint Online site.

Read on to see how it works. Of course, the data source itself doesn’t affect how you implement slowly-changing dimensions, so the technique Soheil shows applies to a broad number of use cases.

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Getting Status of Power BI Enhanced Refreshes

Published 2022-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb wants to know the situation, STAT:

So far in this series (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) I’ve looked at how you can create a Power Automate custom connector that uses the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API to kick off a dataset refresh. That’s only half the story though: once the refresh has been started you need to know if it has finished and, if so, whether it finished successfully or not. In this post I’ll show how to do this.

Read on to see how.

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Allow Azure AD B2B Users to Access Power BI Reports

Published 2022-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers provides access:

I was recently doing some testing and when I went to share a Power BI report with an external (B2B) user I could not initially find out how to do this.

NOTE: I had already created my External (B2B) users, you can follow this guide below if you still need to create the external (B2B) users: Distribute content to external guest users with Azure AD B2B – Power BI | Microsoft Docs

I thought it would be good to share the steps on how I achieved this below.

Read on to see how. Also check out the insightful question in the comments section.

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DAX Studio 3 Released

Published 2022-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo has an announcement:

DAX Studio 3 was released today.

This new, major version offers a new user interface and user experience, providing a modern look and feel without losing any of the features available in previous versions. On the contrary, in DAX Studio 3, many features that were harder to reach in the past are now more visible and easier to use.

The cost of implementing a complete overhaul for a product’s user interface is typically high, but at the same time, this overhaul does not provide new features compared to previous versions. So why bother about the user interface while the product is free and open-source?

Read on to see what those changes look like.

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DAX EvaluateAndLog()

Published 2022-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb is excited:

I think this is the most exciting thing to happen in DAX since the introduction of variables. Why? Well we all know that writing DAX can be hard, and part of why it’s hard is that it’s hard to debug.

Read on to see how EvaluateAndLog() makes life easier, as well as a couple links to Jeffrey Wang’s blog for further detail.

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Data-Driven Report Subscriptions with Power Automate

Published 2022-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English puts together a workflow:

Being able to do a data driven report subscription with Power BI and Paginated reports is a common request we hear from many customers. Let’s say you want to send a PDF version of a report to each of your store or department managers using a set of parameter values specific to each person. In the Power BI service that is not an option, but using Power Automate you can do this.

In this post I will be using a Paginated report that is referencing data in an Azure Analysis Services database and I will be referencing an Excel file that I have in OneDrive for Business which includes the needed information for the data driven subscription with 2000 records. The Paginated report is in a workspace backed by a Power BI Embedded A-SKU (A4 – equivalent of a P1 SKU) for testing purposes and the AAS tier is an S1 (100 QPU).

Read on to see how.

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Incremental Refresh Parameters in Power BI

Published 2022-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series on using Power Automate to call the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API:

If you’ve read part 1 or part 2 of this series you’ll know how you can create a Power Automate custom connector to call the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API and get fine-grained control over your refreshes. In this post I will take a look at the two parameters in the Enhanced Refresh API for datasets that use incremental refresh: applyRefreshPolicy and effectiveDate. They are documented here but, as always, some worked examples are helpful to really understand how they work.

Click through to see how these parameters work.

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Power BI Field Parameters and None Options

Published 2022-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Barney Lawrence votes None of the Above:


Field Parameters are one of my favourite recent additions to Power BI. The ability to turn a single chart into potentially dozens changes the way we think about putting variations of visuals on the page. It was a real wow moment for a client recently when I showed how field parameters for 5 fields and 5 measures could produce a single report page that replaced 25 of their existing reports.

While they theoretically don’t allow you to do much that you couldn’t previously with a disconnected slicer and a lot of DAX they build it faster and without the need to get heavily in to coding DAX. Anything that lowers the difficulty bar for users trying to make the most out of Power BI is a good thing in my book.

There are a couple of issues Barney has with them as they stand now but there are workarounds.

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