Ken Puls is coming again to Australia and once again he has generously offered to speak at the Sydney Power BI User Group. This time ‘round Ken will be talking on a broad topic around how Power BI and Excel are increasingly being enhanced to work together. Microsoft calls 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 […]
Power Query for Excel has developed at a striking pace over the last few years making it hard to keep up with the changes. Over several iterations, the Queries and Connections pane has been called various names, and the behaviour has changed a few times too. Depending on the version […]
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, […]
I was explaining to one of my blog readers recently how to extract table size from Power BI Desktop using DAX Studio and thought it would be useful for others. I have covered the basics of DAX Studio in the past so I wont cover this detail again here. The latest version […]
Level: Beginners I blogged on conditional formatting in Power BI Table visual here when it was released in the May 2016 Power BI Desktop update. At the time of first release, the conditional formatting was pretty basic with only 1 formatting option available. Over time, Microsoft has improved this feature, and now, it is […]
Level: Advanced The EARLIER() and EARLIEST() functions are 2 of the harder functions in DAX to get your head around. If you come from a programming background it will probably be easy for you. However as I have repeatedly stated on my blog, one of the many great things about […]
Level: Intermediate I was helping someone on a forum recently and I thought the question and solution would make an interesting blog article. I have adapted the scenario to work with Adventure Works customer purchases, but this concept would work equally well across other entities, such as sales territories, calendar […]
Level: Intermediate–Advanced I have covered the topic of Lineage in DAX a few times in the past (within other articles). Today I thought I would write a single post dedicated to lineage. As you may know, Power BI has a number of different operation modes, some of which do not […]
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 […]
Level: Intermediate I have been aware of the TREATAS function for a very long time. I have tried to understand how it works a few times but could never really work it out. I think part of the problem is the function name TREATAS is not very descriptive. To contrast […]
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 […]