The July 2020 version of Power BI Desktop released a new feature called the External Tools toolbar. This was announced back in May during the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, and I have been waiting eagerly for it to be released ever since. In this short article today I am going […]
I was doing some work for a customer this week – they had a performance issue with a Power BI report. The data in the workbook wasn’t overly large, about 400,000 rows, yet the file size was 110 megabytes and the performance of the model was relatively slow given the […]
I have learnt a lot over my 50 something years in life, and one of my greatest learnings is that “it doesn’t matter how much you already know, there is still more to learn”. Hopefully this is one of the reasons you read my blog – because you want to […]
I was helping a client this past week to calculate the total business hours between a start date/time and an end date/time, taking into account the working days, public holidays and non-working weekends, etc. As is often the case, I thought it would be a great blog article that I […]
Power BI is and incredible product, yet there are still niggling issues that can frustrate and annoy the best of us (me included). Having said that, changes and improvements are happening all the time and it is easy for new features that address old issues to slip past us without […]
I see lots of chatter on Twitter and other media about the use of “small multiples” as a great way to communicate information across different subsets of data – yes Jeff Weir(d), that means you. I thought I would write a quick article about the concept to draw your awareness […]
This is a further (fourth) update/edit to this article Power BI Golden Dataset I first wrote in Apr-17. I then updated it again in Jan-18, Jun-18 and again now in May-20 (Jason did a full review this time around). When I update my articles, I change the original post with […]
There was a very subtle but important change made in the April 2020 release of Power BI Desktop that you may have missed. Take a look in the format pane on the right in the image below – do you see it? Note the “new” function buttons? When I say […]
Have you ever had report consumers that just don’t read your instructions? Well, you’re not alone. Having delivered our Module 1 : Data to Dashboard training for about 4 months now, I have often been challenged during the Drill Through Reports topic, with students commenting “I’ve tried text based tooltips […]
A few weeks ago, Danielle Stein Fairhurst from Plum Solutions contacted me and asked if I would speak at her financial modelling meetup group (a topic of my choice related to Power BI). I decided to speak about creating a P&L using Power BI and DAX. I first learnt how […]
OK, by now you will likely be getting to understand that I think Tabular Editor is pretty cool. I like every bit about it, and I am learning more every day. Daniel Otykier has done a great job with this wonderful bit of software, and the more I use it […]
In my article today I am going to share another COVID-19 Power BI report with you to explore, and at the same time take the opportunity to talk about Microsoft AppSource and how it can be used to distribute Power BI Apps. Before we move on, just a bit of […]
Have you been sitting back thinking about building your own Power BI Coronavirus report, but haven’t known where to start? Many people tell me they want to get more practice using Power BI but don’t have any suitable data to do so. You can now easily build your own Covid-19 […]
This is my third article about Tabular Editor, the others being the recent introduction article a few weeks ago, an also an article explaining how to copy measures between PBIX files. I watched the excellent webinar series organised by my friend Mike over at PowerBI.tips where Daniel gave a more […]
Seriously, I am so excited! And no, this is not an April fool’s joke! This is an actual picture of Ken, Miguel and me from a few hours ago. Introducing Skillwave Training Today I am super excited to announce that I am teaming up with Power BI/Power Query/Excel gurus Ken […]
Well Covid-19 is a right royal pain in the backside for everyone. Am I right, or am I right? Everyone is effected to some extent, of course some more than others. One implication for me is that no one is able to attend my fantastic live, face to face Power BI […]
Tabular Editor is a community Open Source software project written by Daniel Otykier. I have known about this product for several years but never really invested the time to understand what it does and how it can help me do my job. Last week I attended the Microsoft Virtual MVP […]
I have delivered Power BI training at a number of universities over the last 6 months, and a few of the participants asked me the same question. “What is the best way to add semesters to a calendar so that they can analyse student data by semester?“ There are various […]
In a recent post, Matt discussed how to extract data from complex websites with Power BI using the New Web Table Inference capability of Power Query. This article is an extension of those ideas, revealing that this amazing feature is not just limited to scraping data from static HTML websites, […]
Matt here: If you are a regular reader of my blog, you may remember that late in 2019 I advertised for a full time trainer to join my company. I have been in business for almost 6 years now and the demand for my training and consulting services has never […]