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Category: Power BI

Embedding Power BI into PowerPoint

Published 2022-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington integrates a Power BI report into PowerPoint:

I first blogged about this back in October 2021 when Microsoft announced live Power BI embedding was coming to PowerPoint. Believe it or not, the ability to embed Power Pivot reports into PowerPoint was one of the first features delivered by Microsoft way back in 2014 or 2015. It used to be possible with the first release of Power Pivot for Excel and SharePoint Enterprise Edition. Sometime after releasing this feature, Microsoft refocussed its efforts away from Power Pivot/SharePoint Enterprise and started to re-build again from scratch as a new standalone BI app known to us today as Power BI. It then took another 7 years for this PowerPoint feature to be returned. It’s here now, so let me cover what it is and how you can use it.

I’d joke about how much of an atrocity this is but it really isn’t. Thinking about how many meetings get derailed by the person trying to leave PowerPoint, struggling to open another application, having things fall apart, and then going back to the slide deck (inevitably from the beginning rather than the current slide), this is a good idea.

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Comparing Pre- and Post-Event in Power BI

Published 2022-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari do a bit of comparative analysis:

Many article ideas come from questions we receive from our customers and readers, and this article is no exception. The requirement is to analyze the sales volume before and after a selected time period, to a specific customer segment. In this case we define the segment as the brand that the customers have purchased in the past. For example, considering the customers who purchased Contoso-branded products in February 2018, what is the Sales Amount of Contoso and other products sold to those same customers 180 days before and after February 2018?

Read on to find out.

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Converting a Referenced Query Column to a Table

Published 2022-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen does a bit of magic:

Let’s imagine I have a query with a column called Reportid – and I want to create another query with the unique values from the column.

Normally I would create a new blank query and than reference the column with – queryName[ColumnName]

And then there are a bunch of other steps which eventually lead you to the result. Or you can go straight to easy mode. That sounds like a pretty good idea to do instead.

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Sharing Power BI Content outside the Organization

Published 2022-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira wants to share some data:

I am seeing more and more customers trying to use Premium capabilities to create data products that they can incorporate as part of their main product offering. This kind of reporting as a product solution will add a lot more value to their main product, so I can see why this is becoming quite trendy.

However, it became obvious that the current documentation can be a bit overwhelming and confusing at first.

So I decided to compile the process of sharing content outside of your organisation in a blog post. Happy days!

Click through to see how to share within the Power BI Service.

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Power BI Desktop August 2022 Updates

Published 2022-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington looks at some recent updates to Power BI:

I’ve been pretty busy over the last few months. The demand for Power BI skills has never been stronger, and my company is super busy. I haven’t written a blog article for a while, but I wanted to take a bit of time out this morning to talk about the August 2022 update to Power BI Desktop. As Power BI matures, there is less and less to get excited about with a new release of Desktop, but there were a couple of things that caught my eye in this release, worthy of calling out.

Read on for a couple of quality of life improvements.

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Finding Guidance on Power BI

Published 2022-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra puts together a compendium:

Recently there has been a number of great articles published on Power BI that I wanted to make you aware of that go beyond the features descriptions found in the Power BI documentation. These new articles fall under the Power BI guidance documentation and are designed to address common strategic patterns.  Below is my summary of the articles, and check out Power BI guidance from the CAT by Matthew Roach for a more detailed summary.

If you’re interested in Power BI administration and strategic deployment, there’s a lot of good information here.

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Multi-Developer Power BI Development

Published 2022-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad architects a solution for multiple developers working on a Power BI project:

Before I start explaining the architecture, it is important to understand the challenge and think about how to solve it. The default usage of Power BI involves getting data imported into the Power BI data model and then visualizing it. Although there are other modes and other connection types, however, the import data is the most popular option. However, there are some challenges in a model and a PBIX file with everything in one file. Here are some;

– Multiple developers cannot work on one PBIX file at the same time. Multi-Developer issue.

– Integrating the single PBIX file with another application or dataset would be very hard. High Maintenance issue.

– All data transformations are happening inside the model, and the refresh time would be slower.

– The only way to expand visualization would be by adding pages to the model, and you will end up with hundreds of pages after some time.

– Every change, even a small change in the visualization, means deploying the entire model.

– Creating a separate Power BI file with some parts it referencing from this model would not be possible; as a result, you would need to make a lot of duplicates and high maintenance issues again.

– If you want to re-use some of the tables and calculations of this file in other files in the future, it won’t be easy to maintain when everything is in one file.

– And many other issues.

After laying out all of the challenges, Reza puts together a plan to resolve them.

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Power BI Enhanced Refresh API and Custom Connectors

Published 2022-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb starts a new series:

I love the new Power BI Enhanced Refresh API: it allows you to do things like refresh individual tables in your dataset, override incremental refresh policies, control the amount of parallelism, cancel refreshes and a lot more, while being easier to use than the XMLA Endpoint. However, like the XMLA Endpoint, one problem remains: how can you schedule a dataset refresh using it? One option is to create a custom connector for Power Automate (similar to what I described here for the Export API, before the Power BI export actions for Power Automate had been released): this not only allows you to schedule more complex refreshes but also gives you more flexibility over scheduling and do things like send emails if refreshes fail.

Read on for a link to an in-depth guide on creating a custom connector as well as a few notes on the topic.

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