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: Intermediate DAX is a tricky language; on the surface it is deceptively simple, but under the hood it can quickly become complex and it can take many years to master. If you have ever typed a formula and crossed your fingers when you press Enter, then you know what […]
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 […]
The December 2020 version of Power BI desktop has just been released, and it is undoubtably the most important release since the first version way back in 2015. The super feature that has been released is an update to composite models using direct query of online datasets. The implications of […]
I am sure you know, there are quite a few companies that provide online document storage for free, including Dropbox (which is my personal favourite) but also Google Drive and OneDrive Personal (Microsoft). This article today shows how you can load data from OneDrive Personal (stored in the cloud) directly […]
One of the commercial services I offer is to complete a health check of Power BI deployments. I look at everything including the data model, the DAX, the queries, the distribution approach, and other things to help you polish your work. I thought I would share with you one of […]
Level: Intermediate Updated: 10 Nov 2020 I first wrote this article about how to import Tabular Data from Power BI into Excel back in Jan 2017. The benefits of extracting tabular data are still the same as they were back then however the process of extracting the tabular data from […]
Note: This Affordable Power BI Premium article was first written in March 2019, then updated in Nov 2020 to update the changing licencing information that is available to me. I have long been frustrated by the lack of a suitable scalable Power BI pricing model for small to medium sized […]
I have written a few articles that are related to this topic (articles that utilise this same technique to solve a problem), but never before have I explained the stand alone concept of how to build a visual with asymmetrical columns and rows in Power BI. Let me explain with […]
The ability to apply custom format strings directly inside the Power BI Desktop report view was first announced back in February 2020. At the time I was quite excited and tweeted about it only to find out shortly thereafter that it hadn’t been released at all! It seems it was […]
If you don’t know (or are not 100% sure) what a Power BI Data Model is, you have come to the right place. I see a lot of people confused as to this term “data model”, and frankly I don’t blame anyone for being confused – it’s a foreign concept […]
Power BI waterfall charts provide a great way for users to visualise how pieces of an overall plan (or results) are combined to contribute to an outcome. For example, you could use a waterfall chart to show how sales have increased by year and category as illustrated below using the […]
I’m always looking for more productive ways to work with Power BI and associated tools. As I covered in my article last week, development of Power BI reports using SharePoint for your file storage can be so slow that it is impractical. In this article I discuss the various options […]
Until recently, I had not spent a lot of time building Power BI Reporting solutions that have SharePoint Online as a data source (This article refers to SharePoint Online specifically, but I am sure the experience is the same with on premise SharePoint). Over the last month or so I […]
This is an off topic post for me (ie not Power BI), but then again – who doesn’t want to be more productive, right? I am a heavily process driven person and I like to organise and plan my days, weeks and months so I can be as productive as […]
I have to admit, I never thought that a Power BI Podcast could be a thing, let alone a valuable thing. After all, Power BI is a very visual and interactive tool. But indeed, Power BI Podcast IS a thing invented by my friend and Microsoft MVP Lars Schreiber from […]
History of Switch Measures in Power BI Using a switch measure to toggle results is a mature and common technique used in Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel. For example, a switch measure can be used to toggle what appears on a chart so that the end user can […]
I first wrote this article back in Jan-2019 and have decided to come back and update it now. With the recent enhanced External Tools Toolbar in Power BI Desktop, there has never been a better time to start to learn how to use these tools. Have you ever wondered if […]
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 […]
This article is a follow on from last week. I recommend you go back and read the article first if you missed it, but in summary, I want to write a measure (not a calculated column) that will return the median sales of products while excluding the products with blanks (no […]
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