I love to celebrate successes with the Microsoft Power BI team, but I am also not shy in shouting out when I am disappointed. Back on 25th Nov 2016 I blogged about the then new “Save PBIX from Power BI Service”. At the time I was disappointed in the way […]
Level: Intermediate I am currently in Melbourne for PASS SQL Saturday 2017. SQL Saturday is an annual one day conference event that occurs in many major cities around the world. It is focussed on helping SQL Server professionals learn more about their profession and also network with other like minded […]
Level: Intermediate I was helping a user on http://community.powerbi.com this week. The user had a list of service desk tickets for multiple customers and the requirement was to identify when a customer opened a second new ticket within 7 days of closing a previous ticket. This is not an uncommon scenario […]
Microsoft has recently released a technical preview of Power BI that can be installed on premise inside a company firewall and the Power BI reports can be securely published over the Intranet (not Internet) via SSRS. Today I am sharing my experiences setting up the technical preview for the first […]
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 […]
Today I am combining a few techniques to show how to build a robust cleansing approach for your data using Power Query. This article will demonstrate the following Power Query techniques Joining tables (Merge Query) Self Referencing tables Adding Custom Columns Sample Data I am using some sample data as […]
Level: Intermediate Last week I shared how it was possible to easily create an online survey using Excel for O365. Once such a survey is created, the data can be imported into PowerBI.com and used to create a simple report. The biggest issue with directly connecting to OneDrive like I showed […]
Level: Beginners I think today’s article will be of interest to my readers even though it is a little astray from my normally pure Power BI, Power Pivot and Power Query content. I will show you how to quickly and easily create an On-Line Survey that you can distribute to […]
Level: Beginners I often get asked if there is an easy way to create documentation for DAX measures when using Power Pivot for Excel. I am not a big fan of documentation for the sake of it, but I do see value in having “some” appropriate level of documentation. I […]
As many of you would already know, 32 bit applications do not always play well with their bigger sibling, 64 bit applications. There are lots of “under the hood” files and applications that are always designed to be either 32 bit or 64 bit – not both. In the case […]
Edit Feb 2017: I am very excited to discover that download report now works as I would expect. This blog post was going to be about how excited I was to hear that there is now an option to download a PBIX file from the Power BI Service to your […]
Level: Intermediate [Edit: April 2019] Microsoft made the PDF Connector in Power BI generally available in April 2019. This is another instance to show that Microsoft is listening to the community to add or improve the Power BI features. The PDF File connector will appear under the File category in the […]
Today I am sharing an easy way to use Power BI Desktop as a SSAS tabular server on your local PC. I find increasingly that I am building data models in Power BI Desktop and yet I still want to use Excel to analyse the data some of the time. […]
Level: Beginners Today Avi Singh and I met with Howie Dickerman from Microsoft to discuss the Power Pivot for Excel Add-In. You can read the background to this meeting at my blog post last month. Howie is the Program Manager assigned to Power Pivot for Excel and has a wealth […]
Level: Beginners Today I explain when it is important to create a lookup table and when it is fine to use native columns in a data table. I have rated this topic as a beginner topic as it is a fundamental skill to learn on your journey to become a […]
Level: Beginners If you want to learn new skills using a new tool, then you simply must practice. One great way to practice is to weave the new tool into you daily problem solving. If you have something meaningful to do with the new tool, then you are much more […]
Level: Beginners I got this dreaded Dropbox email recently as shown below. I needed to clear out some of the files I have loaded in Dropbox so I didn’t have to upgrade my account. It occurred to me that I could make this process a lot easier by using Power […]
I am the joint founder and host of the Sydney Australia chapter of the Power BI User Group (PUG) along with Iman Eftekhari from Agile BI. Next week on Wednesday 26th October (for the first time) we will be holding a live meet up in Parramatta to make it easier […]
Level: Beginners I was chatting to Avi Singh the other day and we were comparing notes about the live Power Pivot training classes we both offer in Australia (me) and the USA (Avi). One thing we both have in common is that the Microsoft Excel Power Pivot Add-In CRASHES a lot during training! […]