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! […]
Level: Beginners One of the great challenges Microsoft has faced with its “new” suite of Self Service BI tools (particularly Power Pivot) is that most people that could benefit from the holy trinity (Power Pivot, Power Query and Power BI) don’t even know these tools exist, let alone how the tools […]
I have been on holidays taking a much needed break from work, so it has been very quite on my blog over the last few weeks. But I am back now! I woke up this morning to a very pleasant surprise – Microsoft has delivered the long waited for Query […]
Back in February 2016, I was tweeting with some others about the need for a new name for the Power Query Formula Language. I came up with the name PQL, pronounced Peequel and made a suggestion to this effect at ideas.powerbi.com. This post today is to explain why a name […]
Level: Advanced I’ve helped a couple of people out on various forums on this topic over the last week, and that is normally a good sign that I need a blog post on the topic. The scenario is to create a Pareto cumulative running total based on the top products, customers or […]
Level: Beginners Edit: Sep 2019 I really love Power BI, and I have learnt so much over the last 12 months that sometimes it is easy to forget the challenges I had in getting started. Today I am sharing my top 10 tips on how to get started with Power […]
There was a great new feature that snuck in unannounced to the July release of Power BI Desktop. It was only a tweet by my colleague Imke Feldmann from http://www.thebiccountant.com/ that I was even aware it was there. Include in Report Refresh When you look in the Queries pane in […]
Level: Advanced Power Query I am in the process of finalising some action items after a great Power BI, Power Pivot and Power Query training course in Melbourne. During the training we looked at a scenario for one of the attendees where they needed to combine data from multiple Excel files into […]
One year ago today on the 24th July 2015 a brand spanking new BI baby was born. And its proud parents named the new baby Power BI, and soon Power BI would become known to everyone around the world. Today is therefore a day to celebrate what a great first […]
Level: Intermediate There was an interesting question this week on http://powerpivotforum.com.au asking if there was a smarter way to user Power Query over multiple identical web pages to scrape the data in a single query. I have been meaning to blog about this for a while, so it is a […]
Level: Intermediate Update: 2019. You can now do this natively in a Matrix, but this is still a good trick that can be used to solve various problems. You may or may not be aware that it (previously was) not possible to put Measures on rows in a Matrix in […]
Level: Beginners Today Microsoft announced a great new feature that allows you to direct connect FROM Excel TO Power BI and not the other way around. This simple change really streamlines the integration experience between Excel and the Power BI Service, and makes Power BI even more like you own […]
This article is retired, but kept for posterity. The current version of this article can be found here. Level: Beginners I have learnt a lot about sharing Power BI content over the last year since Power BI hit the main stream. A lot of my learning has come from trial […]
Level: Intermediate I spent a lot of last week helping to configure Power BI in preparation for go live for a client. One of the important things to do when designing a Power BI solution is to make sure you have a good design for your user security access. Today […]
I have had the idea of power query self referencing tables in my head for over a year, and today was the day that I tested a few scenarios until I got a working solution. Let me start with a problem description and then my solution. Add Comments to a […]
Level: Intermediate Last week at my Sydney training course, one of the students asked me a question about LASTNONBLANK. This reminded me what a trickily deceptive function LASTNONBLANK is. It sounds like an easy DAX formula to understand, right? It just finds the last non blank value in a column […]
I was super excited by the May 2016 Power BI Desktop update as it had a stack of great new features. Today I am covering the ones I think are the most useful. They are Conditional Formatting Nudge Objects on the canvas Quick Calcs Customisable ToolTips Improved CSV connector Conditional […]
Level: Intermediate I helped a member at http://powerpivotforum.com.au with a problem last week that ended with an interesting solution. The explanation of how it worked was a bit complicated and worthy of sharing, hence this is the topic of today’s post. Count the Working Days Between Two Dates The requirement […]
Level: Beginners Microsoft recently announced a new conditional column feature in Power Query (Power BI Desktop version) that warrants a blog post. This feature makes the process of creating banded columns much easier for the average user. I blogged about banded columns using DAX here, and now there is this […]