Today I sat through the Keynote session at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit. As expected, James Phillips confirmed that MS has been holding back a few killer features to announce at the Summit. Here is the list of new things that are coming that I wanted to share with you […]
I was reading a blog by David Eldersveld last week where he was talking about his entry in the Microsoft Data Insights Summit Data Analytics Challenge. I originally was too busy to enter however I was inspired by his article and thought I should prepare an entry albeit with only […]
At the start of May 2017, Microsoft announced that Export to Excel/CSV would no longer be available to Power B Free users, and would not be part of the new Power BI Premium offering either. Today Microsoft announced that it has listened to community feedback and has agreed to include this […]
I am an enthusiastic sponsor of Microsoft BI. I have been fortunate enough to build a new career off the back of the great products Microsoft has developed, specifically Power BI, Power Pivot and Power Query. Having said that, I am definitely disappointed with the new licensing agreement changes have […]
Microsoft today announced that it is changing the way it licences its Power BI service product. I want to provide my personal view on why it is doing this, what is good and also what is bad about this change. The Problem MS is Trying to Address Let me start […]
A client contacted me recently and asked me to solve a problem for them. They have a large Power Pivot Excel workbook with lots of Pivot Tables. All was good except sometimes when they refreshed the data, the newly loaded data changed the shape of some of the pivot tables […]
Level: Beginners One of my regular blog readers (and graduate of my live training course) Phil Cross asked me last week if I knew of anywhere to find a comprehensive guide for Self Service BI users of when to use Excel vs Power BI to author new data models. I […]
2 fabulous new updates again in the April update of Power BI Desktop. Here is my quick review so you can see how great these things are. Quick Measures Quick measures are designed to help you get started with DAX, without knowing any DAX! OMG I will be out of […]
Some time ago I developed a tool that allows you to automatically connect a local Excel Pivot Table to a local running instance of Power BI Desktop. You can read that original article here if you like. It works kind of like Analyze in Excel but using Power BI Desktop […]
Level: Intermediate This is the final article in my series about DAX as a Query Language. In my first article I introduced DAX as a Query Language and then in my second article I went in deeper to the specifics on how to use some of the more useful DAX query […]
Level: Intermediate In my last article I introduced DAX as a Query Language and explained why learning to query your data model can be useful. I covered the basics about using a tool like DAX Studio to query a database and return a table of data as a result. In this […]
Level: Intermediate I have written quite a few articles that contain embedded references to DAX Queries and DAX Table functions in the past. Today I am writing an article that introduces the DAX query language from the beginning so you can learn how to use it and how it will […]
Level: Beginners One very important concept that Excel users often struggle with when starting on their Power BI and Power Pivot journey is that they need to learn to think about data in tables rather than thinking about data in cells. In the spreadsheet world every cell can be a […]
Level: Beginners Power Pivot is a database that has been designed from the ground up to be optimised for reporting and analysis in Power BI, Power Pivot for Excel and SSAS Tabular. The technology is essentially the same across all of these products so I will generically refer to Power […]
I love to celebrate successes with the Microsoft Power BI team, but I am also not shy in shouting out when I am disappointed. Back on 25th Nov 2016 I blogged about the then new “Save PBIX from Power BI Service”. At the time I was disappointed in the way […]
Level: Intermediate I am currently in Melbourne for PASS SQL Saturday 2017. SQL Saturday is an annual one day conference event that occurs in many major cities around the world. It is focussed on helping SQL Server professionals learn more about their profession and also network with other like minded […]
Level: Intermediate I was helping a user on http://community.powerbi.com this week. The user had a list of service desk tickets for multiple customers and the requirement was to identify when a customer opened a second new ticket within 7 days of closing a previous ticket. This is not an uncommon scenario […]
Microsoft has recently released a technical preview of Power BI that can be installed on premise inside a company firewall and the Power BI reports can be securely published over the Intranet (not Internet) via SSRS. Today I am sharing my experiences setting up the technical preview for the first […]
Level: Beginners Edit: Sep 2019 There are many best practices for Power BI. I know these things so intuitively now that it is very easy to forget how I incrementally learnt these things along the journey. Most of these things are not “right” vs “wrong” – they are more often […]
Level: Beginners I help a lot of people on forums who ask questions about time intelligence for DAX. If you are just starting out then the chances are that you may not even be clear what time intelligence is and hence sometimes you don’t even know what to ask. Often […]