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 […]
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 standard waterfall […]
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 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 easily switch the […]
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 […]
I was going to title this blog “MEDIANX and the X Functions”, but that sounded too much like a 2030s band, so I opted for MEDIANX returns blank in DAX. But the article does indeed cover more than just MEDIANX and the blank “problem”. But first some background. I helped […]
I’m sure many of you will already know that today is Power BI’s 5th birthday. It has been another great year of development by the Power BI team at Microsoft and the product has literally become so compelling that virtually every organisation should be considering deploying this tool. I cite […]
The July 2020 version of Power BI Desktop released a new feature called the External Tools toolbar. This was announced back in May during the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, and I have been waiting eagerly for it to be released ever since. In this short article today I am going […]
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 […]
I have learnt a lot over my 50 something years in life, and one of my greatest learnings is that “it doesn’t matter how much you already know, there is still more to learn”. Hopefully this is one of the reasons you read my blog – because you want to […]
I was helping a client this past week to calculate the total business hours between a start date/time and an end date/time, taking into account the working days, public holidays and non-working weekends, etc. As is often the case, I thought it would be a great blog article that I […]
Power BI is and incredible product, yet there are still niggling issues that can frustrate and annoy the best of us (me included). Having said that, changes and improvements are happening all the time and it is easy for new features that address old issues to slip past us without […]
I see lots of chatter on Twitter and other media about the use of “small multiples” as a great way to communicate information across different subsets of data – yes Jeff Weir(d), that means you. I thought I would write a quick article about the concept to draw your awareness […]
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