Category: Power BI

Phil Seamark doesn’t have time to wait:

I recently wrote an article showing how you can visualise a dataset refresh using Power BI. It was a pretty cool way to show some of the internal workings of what otherwise is a black box. The idea from my earlier article uses SSMS Profiler to run a trace against a database hosted in Azure AS, or Power BI Premium. Once the refresh is complete, you import the results of the SSMS Profiler trace into a Power BI report to analyse. The approach requires you to wait until the refresh is complete before you can start exploring the data.

Also recently, I had the opportunity work on some large models that took a long time to refresh. I wondered what might be required to update the earlier process to study the results while the refresh was underway. Does that make me too impatient? Here is what I ended up building.

Click through to enjoy the fruits of Phil’s impatience. This is quite the interesting solution, especially if you’re twiddling your thumbs and wondering if this refresh will ever wrap up.

Joe Billingham shows how to ensure that users see dates in the format most appropriate to them:

Which date format styles should we use if we are building a report that is being consumed internationally?

Remember, 01/12/2021 is December 1^st or January 12^th depending in which part of the world it is being read.

The decision may be taken from our hands if there is a company policy in place. If the company is based in the USA, for example, they may choose to use US formatted date fields as a standard for reporting across the entire business, however, if the field needs to be truly dynamic depending on the consumers location, the answer lies in this tool tip:

Click through to see how.

Treb Gatte starts a new series:

Microsoft released a new feature called Power BI Goals to public preview. In this blog series, you’ll learn about using Power BI Goals and Scoreboards to monitor your business, learn ways to structure your Scoreboards, understand how to implement this functionality and be clear on requisite licensing and security questions. I will refer to relevant books and blogs which will benefit you as you implement Power BI Goals.

The image attached to this blog post is a real Scoreboard developed for a manufacturing CEO. It spans the organization and provides a glanceable view of the health of the organization. Many of the due dates are set to the end of the fiscal year as they are annual in nature.

Read on for the first post in the series, which introduces the concept of SMART goals and goals in Power BI.

Chris Webb has an interesting tie between Power BI and Excel:

Excel Organisation data types were released last year (see here for details), but did you know that you can now use them to bring images as well as text and numbers into Excel? Here’s a super-simple example that shows you how to do this.

Click through for the demo.

Gilbert Quevauvilliers has a long list of Power BI announcements:

As I have done each and every year I go through and give an overview of all the Power BI Announcements at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021.

This year once again they have announced some incredible features either available now or coming soon so, please read below.

There are quite a few interesting features here. One of the ones which caught my eye was automatic aggregations for DirectQuery calculations, as that reminded me of MDX pre-calculations.

Reza Rad simplifies multiple selection:

This is a very short, simple article about how to have a multi-select slicer in Power BI. Power BI slicer is in fact multi-select by default, however, there is a very small option that if you set it, makes it even easier to use, let’s talk about it. If you want to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through to see how you can perform multi-selection by default, as well as an alternative setting.

Phil Seamark has a clever workaround:

Power BI doesn’t yet have a feature that allows end-users to turn on/off the ability to process calculations for visuals on a report page until they are ready. Most of the time, this is perfectly fine – however, in some instances, it can be handy to disable long-running and heavy calculations from running. At the same time filters/slicers are get selected.

The scenario you most likely want to have this control is when your model uses Direct Query mode against large tables in data sources that charge you for query processing. Even if your Direct Query data source does not charge per query, having a user make quick-fire selections over several slicers can potentially saturate a back-end data-source and unnecessarily chew up resources.

Read on to understand how to use calculation groups to do this, as well as the limitations around this solution.