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Category: Power BI

Controlling Selections in Calculation Groups

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari looks at calculation groups:

Calculation groups are often used to display options in a report to change the calculation of existing measures by selecting items on a slicer. However, only a single calculation item can be executed for a measure reference, which could make the semantic model harder to use when the user selects two or more items in a calculation group.

Two new calculation group properties, multipleOrEmptySelectionExpression and noSelectionExpression, provide a way to control the calculation in these conditions that, so far, ignored the presence of the calculation group, thus executing the measures without applying any transformation. This article shows how to use these features and provides guidance on using the feature in preview: despite not having a user interface to manage these new properties, the TMDL view in Power BI Desktop and external tools like Tabular Editor already allow you to create and publish a semantic model that uses these new properties.

Read on to see how these properties work.

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Sharing Power BI Reports across Tenants

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi does a bit of sharing:

In this post, we’ll focus on a practical scenario. One organisation, let’s call it Tenant A, wants to share a Power BI report with someone from another organisation, Tenant B. We’ll cover everything from verifying licenses to configuring the Fabric Admin Portal and inviting the external user. If you’re looking to follow along, this guide will give you a clear path to replicate the same setup in your environment.

Click through for the process.

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The Challenges with Sharing Power BI Reports with External Users

Published 2025-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi begins a new series:

Are you a Power BI developer or someone in a BI or finance team who needs to share reports with customers, partners, or vendors? If they are not part of your Microsoft 365 tenant, things get a bit more complex than just clicking the “Share” button.

This is a common need, especially in consulting scenarios, but doing it securely and correctly takes more than people often think. It involves both technical setup and a clear understanding of roles and terminology.

This post lays out the groundwork for the rest of the series, so stay tuned for more.

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Paste a List of Values into a Power BI Slicer

Published 2025-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English doesn’t want to click over and over:

Have you ever wanted to take a list of values from say an Excel spreadsheet and paste those into a Power BI slicer to filter the list? Like say you are only interested in particular set of items, but the list of items is long and filtering through a list of say a thousands values can take a while. I bet you have and this has been an item that has been requested for a very long time going back to 2017!

Well believe it or not, I just found out this week during a meeting with the product team it has been released!! 

Click through for the limitations, as well as a demo of how it works.

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Power BI Accessibility Checklist

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska has a checklist for us:

Whether you’re designing for executives using tablets, keyboard-only users, or screen reader tech, accessibility is not a nice-to-have. It’s a design standard.

Here’s the accessibility checklist I use in client projects and workshops—and now it’s yours too!

Click through for some good advice on how to make your Power BI dashboards and reports easy to use.

For another take on the topic, I recommend reviewing Meagan Longoria’s checklist as well.

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A Peek at Fabric Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev writes a review about writing back:

The May release of Power BI Desktop includes a new feature called Translytical Task Flows which aims to augment Power BI reports with rudimentary writeback capabilities, such as to make corrections to data behind a report. Previously, one way to accomplish this was to integrate the report with Power Apps as I demonstrated a while back here. My claim to fame was that Microsoft liked this demo so much that it was running for years on big monitors in the local Microsoft office!

Are translytical flows a better way to implement report writeback? I followed the steps to test this feature and here are my thoughts.

Read on for Teo’s thoughts.

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“Can’t Determine Relationships between the Fields” in Power BI

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain an error:

When you create a Power BI matrix, you drag and drop columns in the matrix, then add some measures, and Power BI figures out on its own which combinations of values to show. The process is so intuitive that we mostly ignore the details. However, Power BI sometimes cannot figure out how to populate the matrix, thus producing the error: “can’t determine relationship between the fields”. Adding a measure fixes the problem, but why? In some other scenarios, Power BI shows many empty rows, eliminating many of them only when you add a measure. Power BI shows a subset of the values in other scenarios, even when no measure is involved.

Read on for the explanation.

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Methods to Expand a Power BI Matrix Visual

Published 2025-05-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb runs some performance tests:

If you have a Power BI report with a matrix visual on it it’s quite likely that you’ll want all the levels in the matrix to be fully expanded by default. But did you know that the way you expand all the levels could have performance implications, especially if you’re using DirectQuery mode? Here’s an example.

Click through to see what options are available to you and their performance implications.

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Aesthetics and Usability as Complements

Published 2025-05-19 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska explains that you can’t succeed without both:

There’s this UX law called the Aesthetic-Usability Effect. And it basically says:

People will lean more toward better-looking products—even if they’re not the best-performing ones.

Sounds wild, right? But it’s true. A gorgeous report might win hearts even if a more useful, but less attractive one, is sitting in the corner gathering dust.

And honestly? I agree… to a point.

Read on to see when it falls apart and why you can’t focus solely on one or the other. Utility curves are convex, after all.

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Customizing Parameter Display in Power BI Paginated Reports

Published 2025-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword doesn’t like having parameters all helter-skelter:

Parameters in Paginated reports allow for us to tailor report contents based on user selected criteria. These were inherited from Reporting Services as a precursor to the slicers and filters in Power BI reports.

Coming from a Reporting Services background I have a soft spot for pre-defined paginated reports. However these parameters can sometimes get a little unruly. Here we’ll see what that looks like and how we can go about resolving the issue.

Click through to see what this means, as well as how you can fix it. Or embrace the chaos, your choice.

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