How to Become a More Data-Driven Organization
We interviewed over 100 leaders to learn more about the challenges companies face when making a shift to becoming more data-driven.
Power BI
BI Framework
First Look at Google Malloy
Malloy is a new Modeling Language created by the original Author of Looker, it was released last year under an Open Source license, and made available to Windows users just last week, as someone wh…
Sharing your Custom Power BI Visual (code) online (on medium f.e.)
Perhaps you would like to share your Custom Power BI visual with others online or collaborate during the development of a custom Visual. In that case, it's useful to run your visual project in Codesandbox.io so you can share your visual across platforms, like f.e. medium. In this article, I will e...
Data Visualization
Using Azure Data Explorer with Power BI Dynamic Parameters
This is the third post in this series, discussing the usage of Power BI to visualize Azure Data...
How to Get 25 Free Power BI Premium Per User Licenses for Organizational Pilots - DataVeld
Reading Time: 2 minutes Previously, you’ve read how to obtain Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) for a limited trial period as an individual in a new sandbox tenant. What if you’re ready for the real thing–trialing Power BI Premium in your organization’s existing...
An Error’s Expression Stack: A “Journal” of the Locations It Propagates Through | Ben Gribaudo
Power Query
Where to find sample data online
Have you ever struggled to find sample data to play with in Power BI? Did you spend hours (sounds crazy, but it happened to me too!) just looking for a dataset with insurance data? Healthcare data? Housing prices data? Did you ever wonder "where are people finding the data to create those Netflix and Amazon reports that seem to be everywhere these days? Seriously, tell me your secret!"? Well, let me tell you, it's not that hard to find that data after all! I want to save you the trouble to get l
Curate a Personal Power BI, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform Roadmap with the Release Planning Portal - DataVeld
Reading Time: 2 minutes While release waves for Dynamics and Power Platform (including Power BI) have been published every six months for the past few years online and in PDF format, you can also build your own personalized view of items across different products....
Field Parameters Using Measures
Readers of my blog may have read this previous article from Roland where he covered an introduction to dataflows. In this new article, Roland is going to share some ideas about using the new field parameters. If you haven’t subscribed to Roland’s YouTube Channel yet, I highly recommend that you [...]Read More »
Hidden features of Analyze in Excel – Part 2 – Give me all the data - Self-Service Business Intelligence
This blog series is about the hidden features in Analyze in Excel. There are lot of tiny details which can help the adoption of Power BI for Excel users. In this blog we are going to talk about increasing the records retrieved by Show Details.
Hidden features of Analyze in Excel – Part 1 – Show me the details - Self-Service Business Intelligence
This blog series is about the hidden features in Analyze in Excel. There are lot of tiny details which can help the adoption of Power BI for Excel users. In this blog we are going to talk about Detail Rows Expressions.
Hidden features of Analyze in Excel – Part 3 – Focus - Self-Service Business Intelligence
In the first two parts (part 1 and part 2) of the blog we explored the Show details functionality of a Pivot table in Excel. Now we look at another hidden feature that will help you limit distractions. Whenever you connect to a Power BI dataset you immediately see the whole model. The issue is
Visualize Power BI Dependencies with Tabular Editor and Mermaid — DATA GOBLINS
I share a method in Tabular Editor to generate mermaid flowchart syntax to visualize model object dependencies. This code can be directly copied into an Azure DevOps wiki to automate documentation, or into mermaid.live to get an image of the resulting flowchart.
“We need this report in Power BI” — DATA GOBLINS
In this article, I discuss 3 common approaches to collecting reporting requirements, arguing in favor of the third approach - working iteratively & collaboratively with business users to make the report.
When creating reports in Power BI, it’s important to fit the tool capabilities to the design so we can maximize the value from the tools we use. In this report, it takes a long time to get insights from the table, and is very overwhelming. Visualization capabilities in Power BI can help users get information more quickly & efficiently than digging through the table.
They say there’s not enough detail, or that the reports are too ‘fancy’. After some time, the report is used mainly by the executive leadership, while most of the user community turn to other tools and data to answer their questions.
The difficulty with requirements documents is they require many assumptions. In reality, these assumptions are rarely - if ever - fully met. For example, a complete requirements document assumes that the stakeholders filling it out…
represent the entire user group that should use the report
…understand what’s possible with their data, the tool & technology
…know & understand what they need
…can adequately describe what they need to the developer / designer
…can anticipate their future needs and how they will use the reports
…etc
Ideally, the process of defining the requirements should be a collaborative exercise.
necessary, but most useful when combined with user discussions. They become problematic if they’re used instead of talking to business users; ‘thrown over the fence’ between report creators & users.
They start by defining who will use the report with the users
Together, they identify several user groups, each having their own needs and perspectives.
They are working together to define the business questions & problems the users are looking to address. To do this, they ask questions about the reports from their own research, and listen as users explain how they use the reports, what they look for and what they do with the data.
After only 4 hours of workshops, Bink had a much clearer understanding of the users and the report. Bink realized the Flash Report was focused
They drew some ideas on a whiteboard and Bink set to work creating first prototypes.
questions more effectively; users spent less time getting what they needed and had a clearer picture of their situation. Because the developer better understood the business needs, she made better design decisions like selection of chart types, or what metrics to highlight.
it’s feasible, discussing with users can be the single most valuable action you take in a reporting project
and observing the actions users take with their information
There co-creation can bring value, too. Arguably, effective co-creation is a sign of a very healthy community of practice, where self-service creators are focused on answering questions instead of collecting data points.
Some examples:
What actions do we take with the data? What do we do with the insights we get from the report?
What questions are we trying to answer? How do we answer those questions, today?
What do we need to take action?
What isn’t working in the existing reports; what’s difficult, missing or frustrating?
Gathering reporting requirements is a challenging but important exercise. Without the right understanding of business needs, reports will not answer the right questions, and will not deliver the right insights.
Building empathy.
Technically, Bink has done exactly what was requested.
[PowerBi][UX] Messages explaining visuals - Overlap technique
Blank explanation message The idea for this article is to show a message to the user when a selection of filters results in blank data producing empty visualizations. There might be other solutions besides this one, but I like this more and that’s why I’m showing it. To build this, we need to write ...
Embedding a Stream video in Power BI service - Data Bear
In this post you will learn how to embed a Microsoft Stream Video in the Power BI Service, using dashboard tiles.
Certification Updates!
Blogging about Power BI, Power Platform and other things I find interesting.
Automating Your Power BI Refresh History
With Power BI Premium and the Capacity Metrics App, you can track metadata such as refresh statistics of your reports and data sources, as well as additional detail regarding CPU usage, memory usage, and average wait times for a dataset to refresh. Refresh data can be invaluable for users monitoring the health of their workspace and troubleshooting issues as well as IT leaders ensuring proper SLA standards from ETL to the Power BI Report. It also provides transparency and trust to business users to know that the data they are viewing is up to date.
Using an IN Condition for multiple values in Power Query (Power BI) - FourMoo | Power BI | Data Analytics
In this blog post I show how you can use the IN condition in Power Query within Power BI instead of having to use multiple conditions.
Sort Column Name in Power Query via M Code
Sometimes people ask questions about how to order columns in Power query, mostly for Queries with Lots of Columns. We can reorder column Name with Drag and Drop or use Move in GUI to change the column’s order, but it is also possible to reorder via code. In this post, I will show how to Read more about Sort Column Name in Power Query via M Code[…]
Controlling Calculation Items with RLS
Controlling Calculation Items with RLS can't be done directly, but you can do it indirectly with another calculation group. This article shows you how.
DAX
Quality Checks for your Power BI Visuals
For more formal enterprise Power BI development, many people have a checklist to ensure data acquisition and data modeling quality and performance. Fewer people have a checklist for their data visu…
Datasets vs Datamarts – Prologika
Rolling average with working days in DAX - SQLBI
Rolling averages are a very common calculation used to smooth out charts. This article shows how to compute a rolling average taking into account only the w
Rolling average with working days in DAX - SQLBI
This article shows how to compute a rolling average (useful to smooth out charts) taking into account only the working days.
Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) in Power BI, Part 1, Introduction to SCD - BI Insight
Slowly changing dimension (SCD) is a data warehousing concept coined by the amazing Ralph Kimball. The SCD concept deals with moving a specific set of data from one state to another. Imagine we have a human resources (HR) system; Stephen Jiang is a Sales Manager, managing 10 sales representatives in his team. The following screenshot shows the sample data: Today, Stephen … Continue reading Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) in Power BI, Part 1, Introduction to SCD
A new approach for dynamic Power BI visuals? - Guy in a Cube
Want to give report users a way to control Power BI visuals dynamically? Don’t want to use the personalize visual feature? Interesting!!! Patrick has an approach that may fit the need! Dynamic X and Y Axis in Power BI visuals? Yes please! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eurc0EY2Xg A different perspective with Power BI Personalized Visuals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20HwiEhIShc
Power BI July 2022 Feature Summary
Welcome to the July 2022 update. We are thrilled to announce the Error Bars general availability, Metric visuals and Datamarts updates, query performance and data hub improvements, Data in space augmented reality new mobile feature, accessibility enhancements for embedded reports. There is more to explore, please continue to read on.
Create a Power BI datamart in minutes
Get started with Power BI datamarts- Create a Power BI datamart in minutes!
Visualizing views in Dynamics 365 with Power BI is now generally available
We’re very excited to announce that the Power BI integration in Dynamics 365 and model driven Power Apps, which shipped as a preview last December, is now generally available. Dynamics 365 and model driven Power Apps give organizations the ability to quickly build essential line-of-business apps in a low-code environment, increasing agility and modernizing processes. Since these apps are all built on top of Dataverse, they’re backed by your core business data. With this integration directly on views, information workers are now able to tap into this data and explore it using Power BI’s powerful data analytics capabilities without ever needing to leave their app. Just click the ‘Visualize this view’ button and let Power BI automatically create a report on top of the exact data you were looking at.
Power BI - Service