Category: Power BI

Power BI has a feature that helps users understand the sensitivity of the data they are dealing with. This is referred to as Data Classification and can be useful when implementing data governance. Let’s go through how to set this up. First, Data Classification will need to be enabled by a Power BI Administrator under Tenant Settings. To do this, go to Settings and Admin portal, then select Tenant Settings, … Continue reading Classify Your Data with Power BI Dashboard Data Classification

Cross-report drill through is a feature in Power BI that enables users to drill through from the data of one report to another separate report. Let’s look at how this works and how to set it up. We will create 2 reports, one called CrossReportDrillThroughSummary and one called CrossReportDrillThroughDetail in Power BI Desktop. For each report, confirm that cross-report drillthrough is enabled: Click on Report Settings, and check Allow visuals in this … Continue reading Cross-Report Drillthrough in Power BI

We have the ability to pass filters to Power BI reports so we can contextually filter the data displayed. This is useful when we are integrating Power BI with 3rd party applications and embedding in web pages where we want to show filtered data. Here are the steps to do this. First, connect to data. We will use the sample Accounts data here, which can be connected to via the … Continue reading Passing Parameters in URL to Filter a Power BI Report

In Power BI, we can set up drillthrough, so users can go from one report visualization to a related visualization to see more detailed information. Let’s go through an example of how to do this. First, let’s connect to our data. We will use the sample data here. Pull it into Power BI Desktop using the Web Connector. Click Load: Next, let’s set up the report, with the following steps: … Continue reading How to Use Report Drillthrough in Power BI

To remove a custom visualization from a Power BI report, do the following. From Visualizations, select “…“. You will see Delete a custom visual: Select the visual you would like to delete and click Delete: You may see the warning message. Note that deleting a custom visual from this report does not affect its installation on other reports. Click Yes delete: The visualization will be removed from the Visualizations pane … Continue reading How to Remove a Custom Visualization from Power BI Desktop

Relative Date Filtering is a nice feature in Power BI to filter date data. For example, in our dataset we have an Order Date and Amount: Let’s expand our Order Date filter. We can see Relative date filtering as an option: Expanding Show items when the value we can see the options is in the last, is in this, is in the next: If we select is in the last, … Continue reading How to use Relative Date Filtering to Filter Data Easily in Power BI

In this post, we will look at how Month to Date (TOTALMTD), Quarter to Date (TOTALQTD) and Year to Date (TOTALYTD) works and doesn’t work in Power BI. These functions can be tricky to use based on your data and what you are passing in. Let’s go through this. At a high level, these “to date” functions are commonly used in the business world. Month to date generally refers to some … Continue reading Understanding Total Month to Date (TOTALMTD), Quarter to Date (TOTALQTD), Year to Date (TOTALYTD), with DATESMTD, Date Tables and Blanks in Power BI

In this post, we will go through how to create a Power BI chart that compares numbers each year vs each previous year. We will use sales data as an example. First, let’s connect to our data from Power BI Desktop. We will use the sample data from here and connect as in the example. This data holds 3 years of Orders data. Once connected, create a simple date table … Continue reading Creating a Power BI Chart Comparing Each Year vs Previous Year

In this post, we will connect Power BI Desktop to a website to pull down data from the website into Power BI so we can use it for analysis. Open Power BI Desktop and select Get Data->Web: Enter a website URL. For example, I have a page that contains a table of Orders sample data. This is located at https://carldesouza.com/sample-date-orders-table-2019/: Copy the URL and paste it into the Power BI URL … Continue reading Connecting Power BI to a Website to Import Data

In Power BI, report authors can use themes in reports to keep the color palette consistent across visualizations. Let’s look at how to use themes. Below is a pretty simple report. Note in the navigation bar there is the Switch Themes button: Clicking it, we see there are several themes available, including: Default City park Classroom Colorblind safe Electric High contrast Sunset Twilight We are currently set to the default … Continue reading Using, Loading and Creating Report Themes in Power BI