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 […]
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 […]
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