A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Soheil Bakshi gives us two methods to pad those numbers:
There are some cases that we want to add a leading zero to a digit, such as showing 01 instead of 1, 02 instead of 2 and so on. We have two options to do this in Power BI, doing it in Power Query or doing it with DAX.
Click through for the two methods, and for a bonus item which incidentally bolsters the argument that dates should be YYYY-MM-DD.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar explains how to allow users to control transparency in Power BI visuals:
As someone who uses Python/R heavily for exploratory data analysis and Power BI for publishing the final data analytics reports, I have always missed the ability to adjust the color transperancy in Power BI. In Power BI you can change the color dynamically and conditionally but there is no native functionality to change the transperancy.
I was working on a project where I wanted to highlight certain clusters in the data to the business user. Sure, I could change the color but it’s very challenging when the data points are concentrated in a small area and they overlap each other. In Python and R you can easily adjust the
alphavalue in most plots to see the dense area clearly.
Click through for one Power BI solution.
Comments closedChris Webb shows off some diagnostic skills in published Power BI visuals:
The integration between Azure Log Analytics and Power BI opens up a lot of new possibilities for Power BI administrators. It’s still in preview (there’s a lot more cool stuff still to come) but the Analysis Services events that are available at the time of writing are still very useful: they give you pretty much everything you had in Profiler plus some new stuff too. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this data to work out which visual in a published report generated a particular DAX query.
Read on for a demonstration.
Comments closedGerhard Brueckl wants your Power BI reports to know what day it is:
A very common requirement for a Power BI report that I stumble across at almost all of my customers is to automatically show data for the current day/month/year when a report is opened. At first sight this seems like a very trivial problem but once you dig into the problem, you will realize that all of the common solutions out there have some disadvantages and only solve the problem partially.
Click through for a clear description of the problem and a clear description of the answer.
Comments closedPhil Seamark begins a new series:
One of the most powerful features of Power BI data modelling today is creating aggregation tables in your dataset and having simple calculations automatically make use of the tables without writing complex DAX. This feature is available in both Pro and Premium.
What does “automatically make use of” mean in this context?
Read on for that answer and a whole lot more.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers feels complete:
I was really excited to use the Power BI Log Analytics for Analysis Services Engine report when it was released along with this blog post from the Power BI Team: Announcing long-term usage and performance insights (Public Preview) | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI
This is really a great report when using Log Analytics.
I found the one thing that I wanted to view was my report names. The standard report did not have this.
Protip: displaying GUIDs is not the same as displaying useful information. I recommend reading through this just to see how much pain and effort it takes to make the Log Analytics report actually become useful.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi saves us some time:
I see some developers really hate the old style of the visuals when they have to work on an old report and it makes them crazy to see that the visuals style remains the same even if they create a new report page and add new visuals to the page. So some developers go through a lot of pain to get the visuals to work in the modern style. I even know some developers copied all queries from Power Query from the old report and pasted them to a new Power BI file. Then they used Tabular Editor to copy the tabular objects from the old report to the new one. And some even started to build everything from scratch. If you are one of those developers, be aware that there is a simple setting that can help to quickly switch all the old visuals to their new modern style.
Read on to learn which setting that is.
Comments closedChris Webb has an answer, but you may not like it:
There are a lot of articles and blog posts out there on how to handle OAuth2 authentication when connecting to REST APIs from Power Query in Power BI. However there is also a lot of confusion and contradictory information too so in this post I want to give you the definitive, Microsoft-endorsed answer to this question, which is:
If want to connect from Power BI to a REST API that uses OAuth2 authentication then you need to build a custom connector.
Read on for documentation showing how to implement and the big risk you’re taking if you don’t use a custom connector.
Comments closedElayne Jones dives into paginated reports in Power BI:
Paginated Reports for Power BI offer pixel-perfect control over the format of each element of a report. They allow users to fine-tune each field of the report, such as text size, colors, spacing, and print layout, in a more precise way than using regular visuals in Power BI Desktop. Users can access Paginated Reports directly from workspaces in Power BI Service. Additionally, users can embed Paginated Reports directly onto a Power BI report page with the new visual option. This article will explain how to create a Paginated Report and how to configure the new Paginated Reports visual in Power BI Desktop. Please note that Paginated Reports require a Premium subscription. This tutorial is based on a fictional Sales Report.
If you’re familiar with SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll find Power BI paginated reports simultaneously comfortable and confining—it’s much the same functionality as SSRS, but doesn’t feel as complete.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers wraps up a series:
This is my final post and conclusion in my blog series to look at migrating from AAS to PPU.
I have really enjoyed the series and I have learnt a lot along the way, I hope you enjoyed following along!
Read on for a nice graphic showing each step along the way.
Comments closed