This blog will show a technique that can be applied to certain charts allow banding or stripes to help highlight data. This could be horizontal bands to help show data above or below a certain threshold, or this could be vertical bands to help highlight ranges of data by time. In both cases, using What-If Read more about Power BI – Banding and stripes in charts[…]
I was interested in generating some dummy data to do some load testing in MS Azure and came up with a pretty nifty way to generate lots and lots of data using U-SQL. The tip is to simply create a small U-SQL custom generator and use it to extract from a dummy file. First I Read more about How to generate 1 billion rows using U-SQL[…]
A recent post to the Power BI community desktop forums asked if it might be possible to allow a user to make a slicer selection that dynamically updates the x-axis. The idea would be to present the end user with a slicer on the report page with options of Year, Quarter, Month and Day and when Read more about Dynamic X axis on charts – Power BI[…]
An exciting new feature appeared in the Power BI web service yesterday. This is the ability to define a report page as a drill through page. So far I haven’t seen the September release of Power BI Desktop but I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t included in desktop. But for the next few days Read more about Power BI Drill Through[…]
I recently had a requirement to combine a set of approx. 100 CSV files into a single file and encountered an interesting problem along the way. The files all had the same simple structure which was 2 columns. I thought this would make a pretty straight forward exercise – until I started processing the files. I Read more about Taking a byte out of U-SQL[…]
The latest release of Power BI Desktop (August 2017) contains a pretty cool feature that was teased back in the keynote of the Microsoft Data Insights Summit which is the ability to add What If parameters to your data model. To add a What If parameter, just click New Parameter on the the Modeling tab which Read more about Power BI – What If parameters[…]
Measure tables in Power BI models are a fantastic way to group your calculated measures together in one place and make for a tidy model. Unlike calculated columns, a calculated measure can be placed on any table so long as the best practice of using the table name for every column reference. Power BI desktop Read more about Measure table madness[…]
Every so often I find myself needing to import data, but only want data relevant to values already existing in my data model. This is common where I build smaller models based on a subset of fact or transaction records. Rather than bring in entire dimension tables, I may only need the dimension records that Read more about Dynamic SQL Using Power Query[…]
A question I’ve come across recently is around ways to better organise measures in Power BI so they are easier to find. The query is usually along the lines of wishing there was a way to group measures together in the field list so users don’t have to scroll and search. Measures can often be Read more about How to better organise your Power BI Measures[…]
After a whirlwind 4 days in Seattle I finally have some time to think back over the Microsoft Data Insights Summit and digest what were probably some of the more interesting points to come out of the Summit. Most of these came from the keynote so if you would like more detail on any of Read more about 5 interesting points from MDIS 2017[…]