Category: Power BI

As announced at the Business Applications Summit 2018 and shown by Power BI Product Manager Nikhil Gaekwad, Power BI’s user landing page will be revamped as “Power BI Home”. I believe Power BI Home will be impactful in the following ways: Help drive user adoption and engagement Expose users to new and existing content Give users the ability to find data quickly Draw in other users in an almost Slack/Teams … Continue reading Power BI Home

Query folding is a feature in Power BI that is designed for query optimization. We will go through an example to explain how it works. Consider we have a SQL database, WideWorldImporters, that has a table, [Sales].[Customers]: Let’s pull this data into Power BI desktop. Note we will not enter a SQL statement at this point, but rather select the table and perform filtering later: Select the [Sales].[Customers] table: Click Load to … Continue reading Query Folding in Power BI

To find the Power BI Desktop version you are running, click on the Help tab and select About. Here you will find the Version: To find out if you are on the latest version of Power BI Desktop, go to: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-latest-update Below is the highlighted version, which shows my installation is due for an update. To update, download the latest version at: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/  

In Power BI Desktop, there is a feature to Enter Data. This is useful if you would like to add some ad-hoc data that does not come from a data source. For example, you could create a simple table with some columns and rows, and then use that as you would with other tables in Power BI. To do this, in a Power BI Desktop project, select Enter Data: This … Continue reading Power BI – Enter Data and Edit Data

I recently came across an issue with using dates in Power BI with column charts. Here we will go through the issue and how I resolved it. Perhaps someone out there will have more insight! The first thing I did, was create a new Power BI Desktop project. To minimize the room for error, instead of pulling data from an external data source (the problem actually started this way), I … Continue reading Power BI Dates in Column Chart Issue

In Power BI, there is a DAX function called USERELATIONSHIP. This is particularly useful when you need multiple relationships between tables. Here we will go through an example of how this works. Consider a typical example, where you have an Orders table with different dates such as the Order Date (i.e. the date the order was created) and the Ship Date (i.e. the date the order was shipped). You would … Continue reading Power BI and DAX – USERELATIONSHIP to work with Multiple Dates

In this post we will discuss how Dynamics 365 and Power BI deals with data security. For example, you may have Dynamics 365 salespeople that are allowed to see their own data, but not other salespeople’s data. We will look at an example of how Power BI deals with this. We have 2 users – Alan and Christa. Both users are assigned the Salesperson role. With this role, they can … Continue reading Power BI and Dynamics 365 Data Security

In Power BI, a common requirement is to display progress towards meeting a goal. For example, if you want to track monthly progress of salespeople vs their targets. To do this, first create a new Power BI report. In our example, we have 2 tables: Goals – which holds the targets for each salesperson Sales – which holds sales transaction records We will keep this simple and not use dates. … Continue reading Goals and Targets in Power BI