Level: Beginners/Intermediate In the August 2017 update of Power BI Desktop Microsoft released the new What If feature (first demonstrated at MDIS in July). This new What If capability uses two new DAX functions to complete a task that you have always been able to do manually. You still can […]
Level: Intermediate In this article I am going to write about the ALL() function, show how it works and explain a common use case. I will also cover the unexpected behaviour that occurs when using the ALL() function in Power BI Desktop – more on that later. For this article I […]
Level: Beginners/Intermediate As those that read my blog regularly would know, I have been at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit in Seattle Washington for the last 2 days. I had the privilege and pleasure of presenting two sessions at the event. For those that were not able to attend, here […]
2 fabulous new updates again in the April update of Power BI Desktop. Here is my quick review so you can see how great these things are. Quick Measures Quick measures are designed to help you get started with DAX, without knowing any DAX! OMG I will be out of […]
Level: Intermediate This is the final article in my series about DAX as a Query Language. In my first article I introduced DAX as a Query Language and then in my second article I went in deeper to the specifics on how to use some of the more useful DAX query […]
Level: Intermediate I have written quite a few articles that contain embedded references to DAX Queries and DAX Table functions in the past. Today I am writing an article that introduces the DAX query language from the beginning so you can learn how to use it and how it will […]
Level: Beginners One very important concept that Excel users often struggle with when starting on their Power BI and Power Pivot journey is that they need to learn to think about data in tables rather than thinking about data in cells. In the spreadsheet world every cell can be a […]
Level: Intermediate I am currently in Melbourne for PASS SQL Saturday 2017. SQL Saturday is an annual one day conference event that occurs in many major cities around the world. It is focussed on helping SQL Server professionals learn more about their profession and also network with other like minded […]
Level: Beginners Edit: Sep 2019 There are many best practices for Power BI. I know these things so intuitively now that it is very easy to forget how I incrementally learnt these things along the journey. Most of these things are not “right” vs “wrong” – they are more often […]
Level: Beginners I help a lot of people on forums who ask questions about time intelligence for DAX. If you are just starting out then the chances are that you may not even be clear what time intelligence is and hence sometimes you don’t even know what to ask. Often […]
Level: Beginners If you want to learn new skills using a new tool, then you simply must practice. One great way to practice is to weave the new tool into you daily problem solving. If you have something meaningful to do with the new tool, then you are much more […]
Level: Beginners I got this dreaded Dropbox email recently as shown below. I needed to clear out some of the files I have loaded in Dropbox so I didn’t have to upgrade my account. It occurred to me that I could make this process a lot easier by using Power […]
Level: Beginners One of the great challenges Microsoft has faced with its “new” suite of Self Service BI tools (particularly Power Pivot) is that most people that could benefit from the holy trinity (Power Pivot, Power Query and Power BI) don’t even know these tools exist, let alone how the tools […]
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: 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 […]