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Category: Power BI

Getting IDs of Visuals using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playground

Published 2022-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb meets us on the playground:

Log Analytics contains information on the dataset, report and visual that are associated with a DAX query but that information is in the form of IDs rather than names. Getting the IDs for specific datasets and reports is fairly straightforward – you can get them from urls in the Power BI Portal – and as I wrote here, it’s possible to get a list of IDs and names for the visuals in a report from the JSON file you get when you export from Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop. However, my colleague Rui Romano recently showed me a different way to get the same information using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playgound, which may be an easier option to use in some cases.

Click through to learn more about the playground itself, as well as a way to convert visual names to their component IDs.

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Sparklines in Power BI

Published 2022-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad gives us the lowdown on sparklines:

You can, of course, achieve the same thing using a line chart. You have to multiply it for each of the categories (you can do that in Power BI using small multiples). However, if you have many categories, then a small multiple might now show a nice view. that is why Sparkline can be helpful.

Sparklines are normally with minimal information. Their X-axis is a trend based on date (or something similar), but the axis is hidden because of minimal space. You can use the sparkline to understand the trend, the highest, the lowest, the starting and the ending point, etc. Because of their minimal nature, Sparklines are not used for a very detailed analysis. Instead, they are used to understand the trend of different categories over time in a high-level view.

Click through to see how you can add a sparkline to a table or matrix.

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Monitoring Power BI Dataset Refreshes with Log Analytics

Published 2022-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series on DicrectQuery over Log Analytics:


In the first post in this series I showed how it was possible to create a DirectQuery dataset connected to Log Analytics so you could analyse Power BI query and refresh activity in near real-time. In this post I’ll take a closer look into how you can use this data to monitor refreshes.

The focus of this series is using DirectQuery on Log Analytics to get up-to-date information (remember there’s already an Import-mode report you can use for long-term analysis of this data), and this influences the design of the dataset and report

Click through for some KQL and explanatory instructions.

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Log Analytics and Power BI

Published 2022-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has started a new series:

As a Power BI administrator you want to see what’s happening in your tenant right now: who’s running queries, which datasets are refreshing and so on. That way if a user calls you to complain that their report is slow or their dataset hasn’t refreshed yet you can start troubleshooting immediately. Power BI’s integration with Log Analytics (currently in preview with some limitations) is a great source of information for this kind of troubleshooting: it gives you the ability to send various useful Analysis Services engine events, events that give you detailed information about queries and refreshes among other things, to Log Analytics with a latency of only a few minutes. Once you’ve done that you can write KQL queries to understand what’s going on, but writing queries is time consuming – what you want, of course, is a Power BI report.

Click through to see how to use Power BI to access KQL data in Log Analytics, which you’re using to monitor Power BI behavior.

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Macros in Tabular Editor 3

Published 2022-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington notes a key feature in Tabulor Editor 3:

Today I am talking about Macros in Tabular Editor 3. This is a new name for an old feature. In Tabular Editor 2, this feature is called Advanced Scripting (a term I actually prefer, but oh well).  I think one reason for the name change is there are now multiple types of scripting, including the new DAX scripting feature (I covered that as a key feature I love in the article linked above).

Click through to see how it works. Tabular Editor 3 is a paid product, though the free Tabular Editor 2 is still around if your employer won’t front the cash for 3.

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Power BI Model Documenter v2

Published 2022-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld announces a new version of the Power BI Model Documenter:

Back in 2020, I released the first version of the Power BI external tool to document your Power BI data model. Since then, I wrote a lot about this topic, such as why adding descriptions to everything is important and various releases of the model documenter.

Users encountered various challenges with the initial release of the tool. I tried to help everyone to my best knowledge, but some issues kept coming back. Over the past period, I worked together with my colleague Ton Swart to solve all these challenges in a new updated version!

Read on to see what has changed.

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Implementing NORM.INV in Power Query

Published 2021-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann has another function to implement:

The Excel NORM.INV function returns the inverse of the normal cumulative distribution for the specified mean and standard deviation. So unlike the NORM.DIST function, that returns the probability of a threshold value to occur under the normal distribution (in CDF mode), this function returns the threshold value that matches a given probability.

Click through for the function definition.

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Reporting Options in Power BI

Published 2021-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi summarizes the set of reporting options available in Power BI:

Power BI Service

Power BI Service is a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering from Microsoft in the cloud. The users within an organisation, depending on their access rights, may create reports directly in Power BI Service. The users can also securely share and distribute those reports. While creating or editing reports is possible in Power BI Service, it is strongly recommended to avoid this method for several reasons. The most obvious one is that the changes we make to a report may soon get overwritten by someone else that republishes the same report from Power BI Desktop. Check this blog post from SQLChick to see why you should avoid creating or editing reports directly from Power BI Service. The reports are downloadable in PBIX format. 

You can access Power BI Service here.

Click through for the full list and lots of detail.

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