Category: Power BI

Ed Hansberry works around a Power BI limitation:

It is easy to add an animated GIF to your Power BI Reports. However, if you just add it as an image, it won’t animate. You’ll just get a static image.

Animated GIFs can be useful in reports to explain new features to users, or on hidden developer pages showing how certain things were done.

Click through for instructions on how to include an animated GIF on your Power BI report. Just make sure to pronounce it the right way.

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari don’t have time to wait:

How many times have you heard an executive request a panel with the company’s sales data in real time? How frequently has this single request – which is more often a preference than an important business requirement – affected the overall architecture of your analytical solution?

In the Power BI world, requirements for real time often drive the creation of a pure DirectQuery model, with no aggregations to avoid data latency. This choice is incredibly expensive: the computational cost of each individual query is borne by the data source, which is often a relational database like SQL Server. On top of its cost, with this approach you will face scalability, performance, and modeling issues. Indeed, the relational database on top of which DirectQuery runs is mostly designed for transactional processing instead of being optimized for the workload of analytical processes. Optimizing the model is both difficult and expensive. Finally, using DirectQuery creates specific modeling constraints and the need for modeling workarounds to obtain good performance.

Creating an entire model using DirectQuery for the sole purpose of achieving a few real-time dashboards is definitely excessive. The primary scenario where relying on DirectQuery makes sense is when it is not feasible to import data quickly enough to satisfy the latency requirements for the majority of the reports. When the entire model can be in import mode, and a small number of dashboards require DirectQuery, there are better options available.

Definitely worth the read.

Eric Svensen has a quick one for us today:

When you build a date table in Power Query you might use the functions under Date to add year, month and day

And this will give you three steps in your Query

But we can do this a bit faster, and you will save a few clicks with your mouse

Click through to see how.

Matt Allington looks at what’s soon-to-be-new in Power BI:

You may already be aware (but then again, maybe not) that Microsoft shares its plans for upcoming new features for the Power Platform every 6 months, and Power BI forms a subset of that plan. The next plan is called Power Platform Release Plan 2021 Wave 2. It takes a lot of planning to continuously improve software, keeping the current state working while adding new features. Part of this planning process is that Microsoft shares the big picture of what is coming.

I was reviewing the next release plan this week and wanted to share a couple of things that are coming that look exciting to me (as a user/developer of Power BI Reports). The 5 new features I love, and want to call out are listed below (all are pro features except the last one):

Click through for the list.

Marc Lelijveld just wants to peek at some Power BI Dataset details:

We have all been in a situation where you want to get more insights in the specific settings for a published dataset. But when this dataset is owned and published by someone else, you have to take-over the dataset first to get all the details available. In this blog, I will elaborate on what is available to you in the service and share some code snippets that help you to explore other dataset settings like refresh schedules and configured parameter values.

Read on to see what kinds of details Marc means, as well as a way to do it without taking ownership of the Dataset.