Regular readers of my blog probably get sick of hearing me rave about the latest new thing in Power BI. This month there is an absolute cracker – Q&A in Power BI Desktop. In case you don’t know, Q&A is a natural language query tool that allows you to ask […]
I’m really pleased and excited to introduce you to Daniil Maslyuk (Twitter: @DMaslyuk). I first met Daniil about a year ago (originally via email) as he was preparing to move to Australia. Daniil made the plunge shortly there after and migrated to Australia (from Russia) – he now works as a Power BI consultant […]
Where has Matt been? Before teaching you how to pass an Excel parameter to Power Query, I’ll have a few words. Regular readers of my blog may have noticed I have been missing in action over the last month. I have been super busy with the PUG World Tour, delivering […]
Level: Intermediate Background I was reading the questions at http://community.powerbi.com today and saw an interesting question. In short the OP wanted to know if there was a way to identify (via a measure) if the row in a table had a colour =”Blue”, but also to check that there were […]
I first learnt about the new DAX UNICHAR function in Power BI by reading Chris Webb’s blog (which was also the inspiration for this article today). One of the uses of the UNICHAR function is to be able to include non text characters inside visuals. When you combine a logical set of […]
Level: Intermediate The variable feature in DAX has been around for more than a year and I have simply never got around to writing an article about it – I am changing that today. Let me start off with some version information and syntax and then I will show you are […]
Level: Beginners As I often say, sometimes it is the little things that can make a big different for some people – in this case Accountants. I was teaching a Power BI class a few weeks ago and I was discussing how the number formatting options work in Power BI. […]
Level: Advanced I was helping someone on Power Pivot Forum last week with a tricky calculated column question. As an aside, you may know that I always advise beginners to keep away from calculated columns. You mostly don’t need calculated columns because in most circumstances a measure is a better […]
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 […]
Update 21 Feb 2018: There are 2 versions of this localhost workbook. One works with the downloadable version of Power BI Desktop and the other works with the Microsoft App Store version. There were some technical issues in late 2017, but as at Feb 2018 everything seems to be working […]
I have written articles before about how you can extract measures from a data model using DAX Studio and also using Power Pivot Utilities. These are both excellent tools in their own right and I encourage you to read up on those previous articles to learn more about these tools. […]
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: Intermediate Sometime late in 2016 Microsoft deployed a new “Combine” feature in both Power Query for Excel (Get and Transform) and also in Power BI Desktop (Get Data). The new capability makes it easier to combine multiple copies of similar workbooks into a single table without hand coding M Functions, […]
When I was at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit last week I took the opportunity to catch up with Howie Dickerman to get an update on how the bug fixing with Power Pivot for Excel is coming along. I talked about this in my original blog here and then my […]
A client contacted me recently and asked me to solve a problem for them. They have a large Power Pivot Excel workbook with lots of Pivot Tables. All was good except sometimes when they refreshed the data, the newly loaded data changed the shape of some of the pivot tables […]
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 In my last article I introduced DAX as a Query Language and explained why learning to query your data model can be useful. I covered the basics about using a tool like DAX Studio to query a database and return a table of data as a result. In this […]
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 Power Pivot is a database that has been designed from the ground up to be optimised for reporting and analysis in Power BI, Power Pivot for Excel and SSAS Tabular. The technology is essentially the same across all of these products so I will generically refer to Power […]