Original Post : Matt Allington, 24 Apr 2018 Background Technically you don’t need calendar tables to use Power BI, but for most reports that go beyond a simple Excel spreadsheet analysis, Calendars are an essential component of a successful Semantic Model. There are many different approaches to creating and maintaining […]
Level: Beginners Original: Feb 2016 It has been many years since Matt wrote his first take on Calculated Columns vs Measures, back in 2014 when he wrote the blog post 5 common mistakes of self taught DAX students at PowerPivotPro.com. Since then Matt expanded his ideas with the original release […]
Updated June 2024 We update this blog article regularly to keep track of how Microsoft is progressing on its strategic journey in building a world class BI platform. Gartner released the 2024 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms in June. As expected (by us at least), Microsoft is […]
In this article I’m going to talk about the recent change that Microsoft has made in renaming the underlying database used in Power BI from the term “dataset” to “semantic model” (or as I would call it, “semantic data model”). The Word “Semantic” Let me start by talking about the […]
The External Tools ribbon is a feature that has been available in Power BI Desktop since the July 2020 release. This feature should be considered essential to anyone who is regularly working in the Power BI space. In this article I recommend my top five External Tools, that I […]
One thing I tell people over and over again, is that if you want to learn to be good using Power BI, you have to practice. One of the best ways to practice is to find a topic you are interested in and build something useful. River Murray Floods 2022 […]
I love the Power BI community. There are so many great things that the community does. They help each other (think the Power BI community forum) and they also build fabulous third party external tools to enhance Power BI. Measure Killer This week I am sharing a brand new third […]
Every now and then when I have a Power BI project of interest to me, I like to create a video of the end to end process of building a new report. This allows me to share some “warts and all” real-world examples of how to go about building a […]
I first blogged about this back in October 2021 when Microsoft announced live Power BI embedding was coming to PowerPoint. Believe it or not, the ability to embed Power Pivot reports into PowerPoint was one of the first features delivered by Microsoft way back in 2014 or 2015. It used […]
Paginated Reports have been available in Power BI since 2019. They serve an important purpose, but they are not easy for the average business user to learn, plus they require Power BI Premium to use. In my blog and video today, I will show you how you can use Excel […]
I always tell people in my training classes that the best way to become good at using Power BI is to get plenty of practice. Best case scenario, you would do something at work that will help you succeed in your job and hence you will get paid to learn. […]
I have written quite a few articles about Tabular Editor over the last few years. I recently started using Tabular Editor 3, and I absolutely love it. Buying this product is one of the easiest ways you can significantly improve your Power BI Data Modelling productivity. For US$100 per year […]
As is often the case, the inspiration for many of my blog articles comes from my experiences working with clients. Today I was on a call with a client in the USA who is still very early into his PowerBI.com journey. I noticed that he had a Power BI Premium […]
I mentioned in an earlier blog that I have been doing some work with the owner of the InfoRiver Power BI Custom visual. I have been testing, given UI feedback, and more recently I have produced some instructional videos. I wanted to share the first of these videos with you […]
Today is another in my series where I am building out my COVID report for Australia. There are a few things I cover in the video today. The main “new” concept is the dynamic commentary, but I also show you some more warts and all insider view of building a […]
Ken Puls and I decided we would do a live stream chat to talk about a topic of interest to Power BI people. We put out a survey and 75% of the respondents wanted to hear about “when to use Power Query/M vs Data Modelling/DAX”. It’s a really interesting topic […]
Today I am sharing another of those videos where I show you how I have built out my COVID report for Australia http://xbi.com.au/ca The live report is running a few weeks ahead of my blog videos, so that is why you will see features in the live report that I […]
I was inspired into action this week by one of the worst visuals I have seen during the COVID pandemic. Here is the visual below, take a look and see what you think. When I first saw this chart, I simply couldn’t make sense of it. The first thing I […]
This article continues to build on my COVID Case Fatality Rate report for Australia. Something happened with the global source data this week – in short, it was wrong. This is a global database and I am sure there are many people diligently trying to keep the data up to […]
As is almost always the case when building Power BI reports, the first version is just the start of the journey, not the final destination. This article is a follow up from last week where I showed you how I built my COVID Power BI report from scratch. This week […]