Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

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.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed

Creating an Info Button in Power BI

Kristyna Hughes shows how to create an info tooltip in Power BI:

The steps below will walk through how to add an information icon to the report, making a tooltip page containing your additional information, and enabling the tooltip to allow users to hover over the icon and see the information.

This can be quite useful, especially as it gets context information out of the way of users after they don’t need it anymore. That’s important for dashboards you expect people to look at regularly.

Comments closed

Mistakes to Avoid when Creating Power BI Reports

Reza Rad shares some advice:

A relationship in Power BI is often for when we want a table to filter another table (based on the selection of items in the visuals). This filtering happens in the direction of the relationship. Meaning that if DimCustomer has a one-to-many relationship with the FactSales, and the relationship direction is single directional from the DimCustomer to FactSales, then DimCustomer can filter the FactSales, but not the other way around.

What we see a lot in the Power BI models is that the developer changes the relationship to both-directional so that each of the tables can filter the other table. This looks like a nice feature, but it will come at a big cost.

Click through for five good tips in blog format as well as written form.

Comments closed

Power Query XML Inconsistencies

Chris Webb walks us through some inconsistencies:

A few months ago one of my colleagues at Microsoft, David Browne, showed me an interesting Power Query problem with how the Xml.Tables and Xml.Document M functions handle null or missing values. I’m posting the details here because the problem seems fairly common, it causes a lot of confusion and it’s not easy to deal with.

In XML there are two ways to represent a null or missing value:<a></a> or omitting the element completely. Unfortunately the Xml.Tables and Xml.Document M functions handle these inconsistently: they treat the <a></a> form as a table but the other as a scalar.

Click through for an example and a workaround for the issue.

Comments closed

Slow File Open Times in Power BI

Marco Russo explains why opening some Power BI files might take so long:

There could be many reasons for that, but if you have calculated columns and/or calculated tables in your model, you should be aware that they could be the reasons why this happens. It could be, so I want to explain when this happens.

The short explanation is the following: when you open a PBIX file, Power BI Desktop automatically recalculates those calculated columns and calculated tables that depend on a volatile formula.

Read on for the longer explanation, which includes a (possibly incomplete) list of volatile formulas.

Comments closed