Over the last few months, I have received a number of very similar questions at either one of our Live Training courses or from a student attending one of our Ask Anything Power BI Q&A sessions. These questions all revolved around DirectQuery and were often specifically about performance issues or […]
The External Tools ribbon is a feature that has been available in Power BI Desktop since the July 2020 release. This feature should be considered essential to anyone who is regularly working in the Power BI space. In this article I recommend my top five External Tools, that I […]
First, an intro from Matt. I have only met Daniel Duque via LinkedIn. Daniel contacted me last month with the kind message below. He wanted to write a book review and was looking for suggestions on where to do this. I suggested he write it here on my blog, hence […]
Back in 2019 I ran a free webinar introducing Power BI and DAX. Many readers of my blog will already be well ahead of this topic, but then again many of you also probably run into people who would benefit from a simple introduction to DAX. I have decided to […]
The May 2022 version of Power BI Desktop includes a very interesting and useful feature – Field Parameters. Today I will show you how to use this new feature illustrating with 3 (no, wait, 4) use cases – Chart Elements, Chart Axis, Table Contents and Permanent Ad hoc Hierarchies. How […]
Matt here. I want to do a brief introduction prior to handing over to Roland. I have known Roland for a couple of years now – he is a member of the Sydney Power BI User Group. What I didn’t know until very recently is that he has the same […]
I always tell people in my training classes that the best way to become good at using Power BI is to get plenty of practice. Best case scenario, you would do something at work that will help you succeed in your job and hence you will get paid to learn. […]
At a recent training course, one of the students asked if it was possible to add two different columns on the legend of a line chart, so that when a selection is made on a second slicer the chart splits to reveal multiple lines. Given others in the class showed […]
I have been waiting for this feature to be delivered for a while. Until this week, the only way to export data from Power BI was to do it into a source data table. That meant that if you had data laid out like shown below, and you exported it […]
I mentioned in an earlier blog that I have been doing some work with the owner of the InfoRiver Power BI Custom visual. I have been testing, given UI feedback, and more recently I have produced some instructional videos. I wanted to share the first of these videos with you […]
I was inspired into action this week by one of the worst visuals I have seen during the COVID pandemic. Here is the visual below, take a look and see what you think. When I first saw this chart, I simply couldn’t make sense of it. The first thing I […]
I have been increasingly recording videos as my method of sharing tips and techniques for getting more out of Power BI. Some concepts are best documented (traditional blogging) and some are just easier for everyone if it is a video. That is the case again for today. Compare Any Two […]
I was helping someone recently with an issue. They wanted to allow end users (department managers in this case) to enter data in a table as simply as possible, and then use this data for reporting. The challenge often is, that the easiest way to enter data from a user’s […]
Tabular Editor is a Power BI Tabular Modelling productivity tool developed by Daniel Otykier. I blogged about Version 2 of the Tabular Editor in this article here. The 3rd edition of Tabular Editor has just been released, and it is a major upgrade from version 2. TE 3 is not […]
Power BI Desktop is a free, standalone self service BI tool for data modelling and reporting. You will not get a better, free desktop data modelling and reporting tool than this anywhere. Power BI Desktop is evolving at a rapid rate with updates released every month. Due to the […]
As my regular readers may know, I am the co-organiser and co-founder for the official Power BI User Group here in Sydney. During the period where COVID has impacted our ability to congregate face to face, Iman and I have been running virtual, online meetup events. Last week I presented […]
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: 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 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 […]
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