Late in 2018 there was a new Power Query book written by Gil Raviv called Collect, Combine and Transform Data Using Power Query in Excel and Power BI. That’s a bit of a mouthful actually; maybe the title was influenced by the same people that call Power Query “Get and […]
There are quite a few common business scenarios where you get data in the form of a file on a regular basis from some source system and you need to process these files into your Power BI reports. There are 3 common patterns that come to mind. Each day/month/year you […]
A common problem I see some people struggle with in Power BI is when a slicer contains a (Blank) record for some reason. The cause of the problem is not obvious and hence it is not clear how to fix it. This article describes what causes this to occur and […]
I had a question from one of my online Power BI Training students just this week who was struggling to import data from a large *.xlsb Excel file. I suggested she save the file as an XLSX file and try again – and that worked a treat. But the question […]
A few weeks ago I wrote an article introducing dataflows in Power BI and discussed why you should care about them. There are a few questions that have been spinning around in my head since then, significantly: What implication is there to the Power BI Golden Dataset as a result of […]
I was chatting to my wife the other day discussing all the things we want to do next year. It has long been a pain in the butt to get a high level (big picture) view of your Outlook diary to see what is happening (think forest, not trees). In […]
Microsoft recently released a new feature in Power BI called “Dataflows”. You may have seen it pop up in a recent release of Power BI Desktop under Home\Get Data\Power BI Dataflows (beta) as shown below. It is also visible when you log into PowerBI.com and go to an App Workspace […]
There is nothing worse than having a Power BI report that has 50% of the space taken up with slicers. When this happens, you only get half the page to visualise the actual data. But on the flip side, if you don’t have the slicers it can be harder for […]
One thing I often get asked is “How do I create good looking Power BI Reports?”. This is a very good question and unfortunately the answer is not straight forward. I like to think of the visual appeal as the “Art” of communicating data insights. The other major consideration is […]
It’s pretty early in the morning here in Sydney Australia (just after 6 am actually). I just finished a fun YouTube session with Avi Singh where I demonstrated my approach to using variables in DAX to help write more complex formulas. Avi streamed the session live on YouTube, and it […]
I was in Seattle, USA in the last week of July participating in the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS). I love attending conferences like this and it was a privilege to present on a few topics over 3 days. Evaluation contexts in Power BI DAX One of the presentations I gave […]
Way back in 2014 I decided to check out what Google Trends had to say about Power Pivot and Power Query global Interest. In case you don’t know, Google Trends will show you the relative frequency of people searching for certain words – it is a good indicator of interest […]
Level: Intermediate A couple of weeks ago I posted a list of my ideas that I have created at ideas.powerbi.com and asked you to vote for them if you agree with the concept (please go back and take a look if you missed it). I thought it would be interesting […]
Level: Intermediate I got my haircut today (pretty spiffy one too, even if I do say so myself). While I was chatting I asked my hair dresser “on average, how often should I get my hair cut”? She told me (for men) around 4-6 weeks. Then I got thinking (as […]
I’m presenting again this year at SQL Saturday Melbourne (30th June 2018) and Sydney (7th July 2018). My topic this year will be “DAX as a Query Language“. What is SQL Saturday? SQL Saturday is an annual 1 day event that is held in many cities around the world. It is a day […]
Level: Intermediate. Sometimes, just when you think you are getting the hang of the DAX language, something happens that completely baffles you. Such events can cause you to doubt your own learning and progress. But let me assure you – this happens to EVERYONE at sometime or another. In this […]
Today I want to issue a warning to anyone considering using Publish to Web to share corporate data internally within an organisation. Publish to Web is a standard feature on all Power BI accounts (free and Pro) – I first wrote about it two years ago here. This is a […]
There are lots of different ways that you use to do Text Filtering in Power BI including: Slicers (with various configurations) Cross filtering from any visual object The filters pane on the right hand side of your report Custom visuals designed specifically for filtering Most of these standard filters require […]
I recently attended a school reunion (class of 1981 for what it’s worth – wow, I’m old!). We all had a great time catching up, looking at old photos, taking new photos etc – how things have changed! Anyways that got me thinking that it would be great to do […]
Changing Defaults In March 2017, the Power BI team delivered a new feature that allowed you to change the colour defaults in a Power BI report using a custom colour theme. I wrote a blog post over at PowerPivotPro.com at the time. The drawback of this feature, as it was back in March, […]
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