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 […]
Level: Beginners All of the learning examples in my books Supercharge Power BI and Supercharge Excel are built on an Adventure Works database that has a single data table. But Power Pivot is a very capable tool for building reports that combine multiple data tables. Although it is very capable, […]
Ken Puls has kindly offered a special 35% discount (first 5 registrations only) for the upcoming XLSouth Sydney Conference next week. The conference is 2 days and features global Excel MVP/Experts talking on one of my favourite topics – Microsoft Excel The Sydney Conference is on Mon 7/Tues 8 March. […]
DAX Studio is a fabulous free tool that allows you to directly query your Power Pivot/Power BI data models. It is not immediately obvious (particularly to beginners) exactly how using DAX Studio can add value. This blog post today is a simple reference to help anyone that uses Power Pivot get […]
Level: Beginners In this post today I am providing a small extract from one of the chapters in my book Learn to Write DAX. It has been just over 2 months since the global release of the book. As at this time of writing, I have 6 customer reviews on […]
Level: Beginners It is now possible to share your (public) reports from PowerBI.com with anyone over the internet for free (currently a free preview), without the need to manage licencing, logins etc (see demo below). Microsoft has been promising this feature for a couple of months now and the speed […]
I was recently a presenter at the PASS BA Webinar Marathon – Dec ‘15. This was an online Webinar with a total of 7 separate presentations from various experts across the industry. My topic was “Moving from Excel to Power BI – A Business Analyst’s Perspective”. The session was recorded […]
I’m really excited to share with you a new Excel Add-in that was authored by Bertrand d’Arbonneau and has recently been made available via SQLBI.com The Add-in called Power Pivot Utilities combines a number of existing tools into a single new tool bar in Excel as shown below (Excel 2013 […]
Edit: Feb 2017. Microsoft has released an update that solves the problem described in this article. This article still has learning value however you should also take a look at the announcement from Microsoft here https://blogs.office.com/2017/02/08/january-2017-updates-for-get-transform-in-excel-2016-and-the-power-query-add-in/ There are many ways to combine data from multiple files into a single file/table in […]
This is the second of a series of articles where I explain different methods of combining data from multiple files into a single workbook/table. In the first article I described how to use a function to combine data from identical Excel Workbooks into a single file using Power Query. Next […]
I have blogged about these concepts before but thought there was value in creating a couple of clear blog posts covering step by step instructions on 2 good ways to combine multiple Excel Workbooks with Power Query. Both of these approaches require that the Excel files are identical in structure […]
I had an interesting problem this week with a client that uses a 445 calendar. The problem is that they had some monthly budget figures that they wanted to track against actual sales on a weekly basis. We agreed to do a straight line split of the budget into weeks […]
Power Pivot and Power Query are the best things to happen to Excel since the invention of Excel itself. Once you start using these tools there is no turning back. But someone asked me the other day “Is it possible to use Power Query with a traditional pivot table?” (ie […]
In a recent release of Power BI, I was really excited to see that the team had created the ability to pin an Excel workbook to a Power BI Dashboard. I have been waiting for this and it was high on my list of things I missed most versus SharePoint Enterprise. However […]
The team at Power BI is setting a blistering pace of updates and improvements for PowerBI.com and Power BI Desktop. One of the great improvements in the November 2015 update is the ability to control how cross filtering between charts (and other objects) on the canvas works. The default cross […]
Microsoft has released a couple of long over due fixes to some long standing Excel 2013 bugs, both of which have been quite painful in their own way. Unfortunately for me the timing couldn’t have been worse. I literally just placed the order for the print run of my new […]
Level: Beginners I was helping a user at http://powerpivotforum.com.au with a question about collections reporting and thought it would make a good blog post. There are a few interesting concepts involved which I will explain as I go along. The scenario is as follows. We have 2 tables – one […]
I just finished watching the presentation from James Phillips – GM of Power BI at Microsoft from PASS Summit 2015. He talks about the incredible progress that Microsoft has made this year in the BI space, particularly with Power BI, but importantly about the future of Business Intelligence at Microsoft. […]
Level: Beginners I have had some really good positive feedback from a couple of early readers of my new book “Learn to Write DAX”. “I purchased your eBook last Saturday and I want to let you know that I have learned more in the last 96 hours than I have […]
Level: Beginners No software company can build every single feature that everyone wants to see all at once. Ultimately there has to be some prioritisation, and along with the prioritisation comes compromises and ultimately disappointments for some (many?). Back in July 2015, Microsoft started a chain of actions and announcements […]