One year ago today on the 24th July 2015 a brand spanking new BI baby was born. And its proud parents named the new baby Power BI, and soon Power BI would become known to everyone around the world. Today is therefore a day to celebrate what a great first […]
Level: Intermediate There was an interesting question this week on http://powerpivotforum.com.au asking if there was a smarter way to user Power Query over multiple identical web pages to scrape the data in a single query. I have been meaning to blog about this for a while, so it is a […]
Level: Intermediate Update: 2019. You can now do this natively in a Matrix, but this is still a good trick that can be used to solve various problems. You may or may not be aware that it (previously was) not possible to put Measures on rows in a Matrix in […]
Level: Beginners Today Microsoft announced a great new feature that allows you to direct connect FROM Excel TO Power BI and not the other way around. This simple change really streamlines the integration experience between Excel and the Power BI Service, and makes Power BI even more like you own […]
This article is retired, but kept for posterity. The current version of this article can be found here. Level: Beginners I have learnt a lot about sharing Power BI content over the last year since Power BI hit the main stream. A lot of my learning has come from trial […]
Level: Intermediate I spent a lot of last week helping to configure Power BI in preparation for go live for a client. One of the important things to do when designing a Power BI solution is to make sure you have a good design for your user security access. Today […]
I have had the idea of power query self referencing tables in my head for over a year, and today was the day that I tested a few scenarios until I got a working solution. Let me start with a problem description and then my solution. Add Comments to a […]
Level: Intermediate Last week at my Sydney training course, one of the students asked me a question about LASTNONBLANK. This reminded me what a trickily deceptive function LASTNONBLANK is. It sounds like an easy DAX formula to understand, right? It just finds the last non blank value in a column […]
I was super excited by the May 2016 Power BI Desktop update as it had a stack of great new features. Today I am covering the ones I think are the most useful. They are Conditional Formatting Nudge Objects on the canvas Quick Calcs Customisable ToolTips Improved CSV connector Conditional […]
Level: Intermediate I helped a member at http://powerpivotforum.com.au with a problem last week that ended with an interesting solution. The explanation of how it worked was a bit complicated and worthy of sharing, hence this is the topic of today’s post. Count the Working Days Between Two Dates The requirement […]
Level: Beginners Microsoft recently announced a new conditional column feature in Power Query (Power BI Desktop version) that warrants a blog post. This feature makes the process of creating banded columns much easier for the average user. I blogged about banded columns using DAX here, and now there is this […]
Level: Intermediate One of the many excellent sessions I attend this week at the PASS Business Analytics Conference in San Jose was a session titled “Get Latest Insights by connecting your data using Power BI Content Packs and PBI Gateways”. The title was interesting but the content presented by Dimah Zaidalkilani […]
I am writing my blog post this week from San Jose, California USA live from the 2016 PASS Business Analytics Conference. For the benefit of those of you that are not familiar, PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server. Each year PASS holds a Business Analytics Conference – it […]
In October last year, Iman Eftekhari and I set up the Official Microsoft Power BI User Group (PUG) here in Sydney Australia. Since then we have gone from strength to strength and as of the time of this post the user group consists of a total of 330 members. If […]
Level: Intermediate As regular readers of my blog would know, I enjoy helping people on forums who need help with DAX, Power Query or Power BI. Recently I have answered quite a few questions for people that could benefit from a DAX “Banding” solution and hence I have decided to […]
Level: Beginners Edit: Sep 2019 What is Power BI? Microsoft Power BI Expert, Matt Allington, explains This ‘What is Power BI’ post is the third in my “what is” series having previously blogged about “What is Power Pivot” and “What is Power Query”. This topic is the hardest of the […]
Microsoft announced another awesome Power BI feature recently. This Power BI Analyze in Excel feature was requested by Avi Singh from PowerPivotPro.com and was heavily supported as a requirement by the community. You can read more about how you can influence future releases at the bottom of this post. But […]
Level: Beginners Edit: Sep 2019 I am still astounded by the number of people I meet that have never heard of Power Query and Power Pivot. The good news is there are lots of people out there in for a pleasant surprise. I think Power BI will solve the “lack […]
Level: Advanced, but explained in detail so everyone can understand There is a lot to learn in DAX if you want to be a ninja. A couple of the more complex and important things to learn and understand are filter propagation and context transition. It is not so much that […]
Level: Intermediate I had an interesting problem with a client last week where I built a data model to calculate rebates payable to customers based on their sales turnover. There were a few challenges that I am going to cover below, including: There needs to be a user friendly way […]