Category: Power BI

Marc Lelijveld has an update for us:

First of all, I worked on the cleanness of my code. As I’m not a native developer, I have to do a lot of trial and error to get stuff working exactly as I have it in mind. As of the beginning, the script contains a task to create the drop off folder for the connection file. Though, if the folder already existed, the script wrote an error to the screen, while everything was actually going as planned. In v1.2.0 of the model documenter, I enhanced the error handling to only write errors to the screen that actually matter.

Secondly, the transcript that runs while the tool is executed, generates a log file. This log file was not always entirely complete. I further enhanced the logging to easier debug in case of undesirable errors.

There are more improvements as well, so check it out.

Alberto Ferrari has another good use for calculation groups:

This technique works just fine; it has the disadvantage of creating many measures, one for each combination of relationship to activate and base measure. Another solution is to create a calculation group that changes the active relationship of the selected measure. Doing this, you create one calculation item for each relationship and the user chooses the relationship to activate using a slicer or a report filter.

But read on for the calculation group solution, which is a clever way of deferring which relationship you care about until the user selects it.

Erik Svensen has a handy shortcut for us:

Working with the field list on a large model in Power BI Desktop can quickly make you end up with a lot of expanded tables and you collapsing them one by one.

Instead of click-click-click, Erik has a much smoother solution.

Erik Svensen has nothing to hide:

When you connect to a Power BI Dataset from Power BI desktop you might have noticed that you can see and use hidden measures and columns in the dataset.

But the hidden fields cannot be seen if you browse the dataset in Excel.

But that does not mean that you cannot use the fields in Excel – and here is how you can do it.

Read on for a few techniques.

Chris Webb has an interesting problem to solve:

This week a customer came to me with the following problem: they had scheduled the refresh of their dataset but their source data wasn’t always ready in time, so the old data was being loaded by mistake. The best solution here is to use some kind of external service (for example Power Automate) to poll the data source regularly to see if it’s ready, and then to refresh the dataset via the Power BI REST API when it is. However, it got me thinking about a different way of tackling this: is it possible to write some M code that will do the same thing? It turns out that it is, but it’s quite complicated – so I don’t recommend you use the code below in the real world. Nevertheless I wanted to write up the solution I came up with because it’s interesting and you never know, it might be useful one day.

Read on for the less-than-optimal solution, but do check out the better solution Chris describes.