The team at Power BI is setting a blistering pace of updates and improvements for PowerBI.com and Power BI Desktop. One of the great improvements in the November 2015 update is the ability to control how cross filtering between charts (and other objects) on the canvas works. The default cross […]
Microsoft has released a couple of long over due fixes to some long standing Excel 2013 bugs, both of which have been quite painful in their own way. Unfortunately for me the timing couldn’t have been worse. I literally just placed the order for the print run of my new […]
Level: Beginners I was helping a user at http://powerpivotforum.com.au with a question about collections reporting and thought it would make a good blog post. There are a few interesting concepts involved which I will explain as I go along. The scenario is as follows. We have 2 tables – one […]
I just finished watching the presentation from James Phillips – GM of Power BI at Microsoft from PASS Summit 2015. He talks about the incredible progress that Microsoft has made this year in the BI space, particularly with Power BI, but importantly about the future of Business Intelligence at Microsoft. […]
Level: Beginners I have had some really good positive feedback from a couple of early readers of my new book “Learn to Write DAX”. “I purchased your eBook last Saturday and I want to let you know that I have learned more in the last 96 hours than I have […]
Level: Beginners No software company can build every single feature that everyone wants to see all at once. Ultimately there has to be some prioritisation, and along with the prioritisation comes compromises and ultimately disappointments for some (many?). Back in July 2015, Microsoft started a chain of actions and announcements […]
Before showing you how to do cross join in power query, let me tell you a story. I had a situation this week where I need to create a budget table in Power Pivot. I had a choice of either loading a weekly budget as a single record per store […]
The long awaited book from Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar has just been released in digital edition. I read this book over the weekend and wanted to share my experience with anyone considering buying this book or wanting to learn more about Power Query. This book is 220+ pages of […]
Level: Beginners Recently I was working for a client that required the matching of a list of data sent from a customer against some internal business data. This type of data matching is actually an audit process that I would have historically done with MS Access, but it occurred to me […]
Level: Beginners When you write a Power Query workbook in Excel 2013, you are given 4 choices of what to do with results. One of the choices is to load the resulting query directly to the Power Pivot data model. This choice does not exist in Excel 2010. It is […]
As regular readers of my blog would know, I attended the PASS Business Analyst Conference in Santa Clara California this year (April 2015). Here is the link for next year if you are interested. While I was there, I had the pleasure of presenting on one of my favourite topics […]
I was helping a participant at http://powerpivotforum.com.au with a problem. Long story short, she needed to return a table to Excel from a data model – not a Pivot Table. This concept can be a bit strange at first – let me explain. Tables – Not Pivot Tables A Pivot […]
Level: Beginners I helped a couple of people this week on the topic of creating multiple relationships between two tables. There is not a lot of information on this topic on the web so I thought I would write about it here. Power Pivot is not the Same a Relational […]
I have been doing a lot of work with Power Query for clients in recent months. It is not always obvious exactly what you need to do when you start writing a Power Query. As a result I have found that the Power Query workbooks tend to “evolve” during the […]
I am really looking forward with anticipation and excitement about the future of http://PowerBI.com. Microsoft has just released the August 2015 update to Power BI Desktop just 1 month after PowerBI.com becoming generally available (GA). Power BI Desktop used to be called Power BI Designer, and it is the tool […]
Level: Beginners I have blogged before about how to combine multiple files in a folder using Power Query. The way I have always done it is to use a Function, and this is not hard to do if you follow the instructions I provided on my last blog on this topic […]
Level: Beginners One of the topics in my book “Supercharge Power BI: Power BI is Better When you Learn to Write DAX” talks about the optimal shape of your data tables. It is such an important topic that I have decided to share some modified extracts from the book here. When […]
Level: Beginners I have been working with a client here in Sydney were we are producing some Human Resource (HR) reporting tools to analyse what is happening across the business. HR data is quite often very sensitive because it can contain personal information as well as salary information. A lot […]
Level: Beginners I was working with a client recently and was asked a question… “How do I remove duplicate connections in Power Pivot”? I know this is an issue and I specifically advise people to be careful in my training courses and also in my book. But of course once […]
Level: Beginners Edit: March 2021 I love books. Even in this world of the Internet I still like to buy a good book of structured “curated content” that takes the reader on a journey. There are quite a few books out there about the various Microsoft BI products. I plan […]