One of the challenges I regularly encounter when working with client data is that people rarely enter information the way we wish they would. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with CRM records, financial data, forms, spreadsheets, or hand-entered notes. Eventually you’ll encounter a column that looks something like this: […]
Original Post : Matt Allington, 24 Apr 2018 Background Technically you don’t need calendar tables to use Power BI, but for most reports that go beyond a simple Excel spreadsheet analysis, Calendars are an essential component of a successful Semantic Model. There are many different approaches to creating and maintaining […]
Today I’m going to share my solution to a question I found on the MrExcel forum. It’s an interesting problem. https://www.mrexcel.com/board/threads/power-query-to-determine-consecutive-and-non-consecutive-dates.1261496/ Let me briefly explain the problem. The Problem We have the following table, which contains the source data. Each row contains a unique ID (maybe a piece of equipment) […]
Ken Puls and I decided we would do a live stream chat to talk about a topic of interest to Power BI people. We put out a survey and 75% of the respondents wanted to hear about “when to use Power Query/M vs Data Modelling/DAX”. It’s a really interesting topic […]
Today I am sharing another of those videos where I show you how I have built out my COVID report for Australia http://xbi.com.au/ca The live report is running a few weeks ahead of my blog videos, so that is why you will see features in the live report that I […]
This is not the first time I have shared this concept. In my previous article I showed how it is possible to add a prefix to every column in a table. This article today is slightly different. Today I am removing text from multiple columns all at once using some […]
I was inspired into action this week by one of the worst visuals I have seen during the COVID pandemic. Here is the visual below, take a look and see what you think. When I first saw this chart, I simply couldn’t make sense of it. The first thing I […]
This article continues to build on my COVID Case Fatality Rate report for Australia. Something happened with the global source data this week – in short, it was wrong. This is a global database and I am sure there are many people diligently trying to keep the data up to […]
As promised, today I am sharing with you the process I went through to build the COVID report I shared in my last article. One of the best ways to learn and improve your Power BI skills is to practice. The best way to practice is to find something you […]
I was helping someone recently with an issue. They wanted to allow end users (department managers in this case) to enter data in a table as simply as possible, and then use this data for reporting. The challenge often is, that the easiest way to enter data from a user’s […]
As my regular readers may know, I am the co-organiser and co-founder for the official Power BI User Group here in Sydney. During the period where COVID has impacted our ability to congregate face to face, Iman and I have been running virtual, online meetup events. Last week I presented […]
Level: Beginners First posted May 2015, Updated Feb 2021. Many aspects of this article also apply to Power Pivot for Excel. Technically you don’t need calendar tables to use Power BI. Power BI comes with an inbuilt date capability called “Auto Time Intelligence”. But the inbuilt capability is very basic, […]
Level: Beginners The objective of this article is to help you understand the differences between shaping your data (using Power Query) and modelling your data (using the modelling tools inside Power BI). You will need to do both to build a robust Power BI report. I first wrote this article […]
One of the features of Power BI (and Power Pivot) is that data cannot be changed once it is loaded into the database – this is by design. Power BI is a reporting database, it is not a spreadsheet. Power Pivot and Power BI are built to faithfully report on […]
I was doing some work for a customer this week – they had a performance issue with a Power BI report. The data in the workbook wasn’t overly large, about 400,000 rows, yet the file size was 110 megabytes and the performance of the model was relatively slow given the […]
In a recent post, Matt discussed how to extract data from complex websites with Power BI using the New Web Table Inference capability of Power Query. This article is an extension of those ideas, revealing that this amazing feature is not just limited to scraping data from static HTML websites, […]
Learn how to remove duplicates keep the last record on power query. Today I was helping a customer with a problem that seemed quite simple on the surface. She had a data table containing historical customer sales orders (each customer has many orders on different dates). The objective was to […]
Back in 2018 I wrote an article showing how to extract data from websites using Power Query in Excel. For simple websites this process is very straightforward. For more complex websites the process is not always that easy. Microsoft is working on improving the “from web” experience and is building […]
I have written a series of articles where I explained different methods of combining data from multiple files into a single workbook/table using Power Query. In the first article, I explained how to create a custom function when you want to reshape the data in the source files. In the […]
In this article I am going to share with you a concept to manage refresh failures in production PowerBI.com reports. In a perfect world, you should configure your queries so that they “prevent” possible refresh failure issues from occurring, but also to notify you when something goes wrong without the […]