I was delivering an advanced DAX class recently and was chatting with the bright students in the class about various topics. Through the discussions it occurred to me that it may be possible to create a compound join between 2 tables using a combination of the inactive relationship feature and […]
Learn how to remove duplicates keep the last record on power query. Today I was helping a customer with a problem that seemed quite simple on the surface. She had a data table containing historical customer sales orders (each customer has many orders on different dates). The objective was to […]
As most readers of my website would surely know, Microsoft Excel has had a dual axis line chart as a standard charting visual for many many (many) years. A dual axis line chart is needed when you have 2 sets of data to display with significantly different scales like the […]
Back in 2018 I wrote an article showing how to extract data from websites using Power Query in Excel. For simple websites this process is very straightforward. For more complex websites the process is not always that easy. Microsoft is working on improving the “from web” experience and is building […]
Edit: 27th Nov 2019. Note applications for this job are now closed. Meet Jason, my full time trainer. It is 5.5 years since I left my 25 year corporate role at Coca-Cola and started my own business training and supporting the Microsoft self-service BI tools (Power BI, Power Query and […]
Last week in Orlando Florida, Microsoft held its annual Ignite conference. I have never been to Ignite but it is on my list of things to do in the future. There are always lots of announcements at this conference but there was one announcement that I haven’t seen much publicity […]
I stumbled across an interesting problem recently when helping someone on a forum. Here is the scenario. Assume there is a help desk that is logging tickets into a system. Each ticket is assigned to single staff member who is responsible to action that ticket. The requirement is that when […]
I have written a series of articles where I explained different methods of combining data from multiple files into a single workbook/table using Power Query. In the first article, I explained how to create a custom function when you want to reshape the data in the source files. In the […]
I have been planning for various speaking and training events over the last 6 months and these events are now rapidly approaching. As it turns out, it seems I have a bit of a world tour planned and so I wanted to share these plans with you in the hope […]
Last week I held a free Power BI webinar for people starting out with Power BI who are wondering why they should invest time in learning about DAX. I had more than 700 people register and was completely overwhelmed by the response. There were a few questions that I didn’t […]
Recently Microsoft introduced the DAX REMOVEFILTERS() new function. This is a very useful and well named function and it does exactly what its name suggests. Its purpose is to act as a table filter parameter inside CALCULATE() as shown in the following example. Total Sales All Products REMOVEFILTERS() = CALCULATE([Total […]
I was delivering Power BI training in Melbourne last week and one of my students asked if it was possible to show on a report if any filters have been applied. It is a very good question because it is not always immediately obvious if filters have been applied or […]
UPDATE: Below is a registration link for access to the Webinar. On 2 October I will be hosting a free webinar called “Introduction to DAX for Power BI”. I have trained literally thousands of people on the DAX language through my books, online training and live training. But everyone is […]
In this article I am going to share with you a concept to manage refresh failures in production PowerBI.com reports. In a perfect world, you should configure your queries so that they “prevent” possible refresh failure issues from occurring, but also to notify you when something goes wrong without the […]
There are some valid reasons why you may need to change the names of all the columns in a table for use in Power BI. It is of course possible to change each column name by editing it manually, but what I am going to show you today is changing […]
Last week I attended Summit Australia in Melbourne. Summit Australia is a conference that focuses on the same products as the larger Microsoft Business Applications Summit (held this year in Atlanta). The majority of delegates visiting the Summit this year were interested in Microsoft Dynamics, but there was also a […]
One common requirement I have come across a few times is to limit a Power BI visual to only show completed months and exclude the current active month. This is common if you load data on a daily basis, but some of your reporting is done on a monthly basis. […]
A few weeks ago I wrote an article “Conditional Formatting Using Icons In Power BI” about the Power BI Icon feature released in July 2019. There were 2 common questions/themes coming from readers’ comments, and I want to address those here. Where can I find a list of Power BI […]
Level: Intermediate In my last article, I introduced the basics of the DAX FILTER() function. Hopefully that introductory explanation to FILTER() helped you get your head around what FILTER() is doing under the hood. With that knowledge in place, let me help you take your understanding to the next level. […]
Level: Intermediate FILTER() is one of the most important functions in the DAX language. It is quite a simple function and yet many people are scared off when they see it. In this article I will explain the basics of using the FILTER() function in DAX. Make sure you then […]