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 […]
This is a further (fourth) update/edit to this article I first wrote in Apr-17. I then updated it again in Jan-18, Jun-18 and again now in May-20 (Jason did a full review this time around). When I update my articles, I change the original post with the latest and best […]
There was a very subtle but important change made in the April 2020 release of Power BI Desktop that you may have missed. Take a look in the format pane on the right in the image below – do you see it? Note the “new” function buttons? When I say […]
Have you ever had report consumers that just don’t read your instructions? Well, you’re not alone. Having delivered our Module 1 : Data to Dashboard training for about 4 months now, I have often been challenged during the Drill Through Reports topic, with students commenting “I’ve tried text based tooltips […]
A few weeks ago, Danielle Stein Fairhurst from Plum Solutions contacted me and asked if I would speak at her financial modelling meetup group (a topic of my choice related to Power BI). I decided to speak about creating a P&L using Power BI and DAX. I first learnt how […]
OK, by now you will likely be getting to understand that I think Tabular Editor is pretty cool. I like every bit about it, and I am learning more every day. Daniel Otykier has done a great job with this wonderful bit of software, and the more I use it […]
In a recent post, Matt discussed how to extract data from complex websites with Power BI using the New Web Table Inference capability of Power Query. This article is an extension of those ideas, revealing that this amazing feature is not just limited to scraping data from static HTML websites, […]
Updated Feb 2020 Gartner released the 2020 magic quadrant for Business Intelligence early in Feb 2020. As expected (by me at least), Microsoft is continuing its trail blazing and has maintained a clear lead over Tableau in both ability to execute and completeness of vision. Last year (in 2019) I […]
As most readers of my website would surely know, Microsoft Excel has had a dual axis line chart as a standard charting visual for many many (many) years. A dual axis line chart is needed when you have 2 sets of data to display with significantly different scales like the […]
Back in 2018 I wrote an article showing how to extract data from websites using Power Query in Excel. For simple websites this process is very straightforward. For more complex websites the process is not always that easy. Microsoft is working on improving the “from web” experience and is building […]
I stumbled across an interesting problem recently when helping someone on a forum. Here is the scenario. Assume there is a help desk that is logging tickets into a system. Each ticket is assigned to single staff member who is responsible to action that ticket. The requirement is that when […]
I have written a series of articles where I explained different methods of combining data from multiple files into a single workbook/table using Power Query. In the first article, I explained how to create a custom function when you want to reshape the data in the source files. In the […]
I was delivering Power BI training in Melbourne last week and one of my students asked if it was possible to show on a report if any filters have been applied. It is a very good question because it is not always immediately obvious if filters have been applied or […]
In this article I am going to share with you a concept to manage refresh failures in production PowerBI.com reports. In a perfect world, you should configure your queries so that they “prevent” possible refresh failure issues from occurring, but also to notify you when something goes wrong without the […]
Last week I attended Summit Australia in Melbourne. Summit Australia is a conference that focuses on the same products as the larger Microsoft Business Applications Summit (held this year in Atlanta). The majority of delegates visiting the Summit this year were interested in Microsoft Dynamics, but there was also a […]
One common requirement I have come across a few times is to limit a Power BI visual to only show completed months and exclude the current active month. This is common if you load data on a daily basis, but some of your reporting is done on a monthly basis. […]
A few weeks ago I wrote an article “Conditional Formatting Using Icons In Power BI” about the Power BI Icon feature released in July 2019. There were 2 common questions/themes coming from readers’ comments, and I want to address those here. Where can I find a list of Power BI […]
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