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 […]
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 one of […]
Level: Intermediate Updated: 10 Nov 2020 I first wrote this article about how to import Tabular Data from Power BI 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 from […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Well Covid-19 is a right royal pain in the backside for everyone. Am I right, or am I right? Everyone is effected to some extent, of course some more than others. One implication for me is that no one is able to attend my fantastic live, face to face Power BI […]
I have delivered Power BI training at a number of universities over the last 6 months, and a few of the participants asked me the same question. “What is the best way to add semesters to a calendar so that they can analyse student data by semester?“ There are various […]
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, […]
I was delivering an advanced DAX class recently and was chatting with the bright students in the class about various topics. Through the discussions it occurred to me that it may be possible to create a compound join between 2 tables using a combination of the inactive relationship feature and […]
Learn how to remove duplicates keep the last record on power query. Today I was helping a customer with a problem that seemed quite simple on the surface. She had a data table containing historical customer sales orders (each customer has many orders on different dates). The objective was to […]
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 […]