Level: Beginners First posted May 2015, Updated Feb 2021. Many aspects of this article also apply to Power Pivot for Excel. Technically you don’t need a calendar table to use Power BI. Power BI comes with an inbuilt date capability called “Auto Time Intelligence”. But the inbuilt capability is very […]
Level: Beginners The objective of this article is to help you understand the differences between shaping your data (using Power Query) and modelling your data (using the modelling tools inside Power BI). You will need to do both to build a robust Power BI report. I first wrote this article […]
Level: Intermediate In my last article, I introduced the basics of the DAX FILTER() function. Hopefully that introductory explanation to FILTER() helped you get your head around what FILTER() is doing under the hood. With that knowledge in place, let me help you take your understanding to the next level. […]
This is the longest running blog post series I have on my website. Why does Power Pivot Crash so often and what can I do about it? I have three previous articles that you can read in the links below Original post (Oct 16): Does the Power Pivot Excel Add […]
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 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 […]
After what seems like a lifetime of waiting for the paperback book economy to tick its required boxes, both of my new books Supercharge Excel and Supercharge Power BI are now available to ship to most countries in the world from Amazon.com. This is a good opportunity for me to […]
Level: Advanced I was answering an interesting forum question last week, and as is often the case I thought it would make an interesting article to share with you all here. I have modified the scenario a bit for this article and have built out some test measures to help […]
There are some things that are very easy to do in Excel that don’t seem to have an immediately obvious and simple solution in DAX. One such problem is when you want to apply compound growth on an investment. Let me make up an example so it is clear what […]
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: 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 […]
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: Beginners One very important concept that Excel users often struggle with when starting on their Power BI and Power Pivot journey is that they need to learn to think about data in tables rather than thinking about data in cells. In the spreadsheet world every cell can be a […]
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 […]
Level: Beginners Edit: Sep 2019 There are many best practices for Power BI. I know these things so intuitively now that it is very easy to forget how I incrementally learnt these things along the journey. Most of these things are not “right” vs “wrong” – they are more often […]
Level: Beginners I help a lot of people on forums who ask questions about time intelligence for DAX. If you are just starting out then the chances are that you may not even be clear what time intelligence is and hence sometimes you don’t even know what to ask. Often […]
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