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 […]
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 a calendar table to use Power BI. Power BI comes with an inbuilt date capability called “Auto Time Intelligence”. But the inbuilt capability is very […]
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 […]
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 […]
Level: Intermediate. 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 […]
Level: Intermediate Updated: 10 Nov 2020 I first wrote this article about how to get tabular data from the Power BI Service 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 […]
Note: This 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 enterprises (SMEs). You can […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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