Recently I worked on a neat little POC with Patrick Leblanc for a customer in Education who wished to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on surveys completed by students regarding classes and instructors, which brings me to this blog post.
Using Azure ML and a free subscription to the Text Analytics API, I’m going to show you how to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on Continue reading Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI
Thank you to everyone that attended my Power BI webinar last month, September 29th. Sorry its taken me a while to finally make the information available, but my schedule has been crazy lately! The good news is, however, the recording is available! So if you weren’t able to watch the webinar live, you can still catch the recording anytime you like.
Continue reading Power BI Tips, Tricks & Best Practices Webinar Recording & Materials Now Available
One of the current issues in Power BI is the inability to specify a Date table. The Date table is what enables us to create some of the powerful DAX time calculations like Year To Date, Month To Date and more when the Date key is not a Date data type. Ginger Grant has blogged about this issue with a proposed work around, which you can read about here. Even though we can’t exactly specify which table is our Date table in Power BI, that doesn’t mean we can’t create some nifty time calculations with Continue reading Creating Time Calculations in Power BI
I’m excited to be able to say that coming up next week on Thursday September 10, I’ll be presenting my session Power Pivot 101: An Introduction to the PASS Excel BI Virtual Chapter! For a lot of users, Power Pivot is like the Ferrari you had in your garage but weren’t aware and that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to be able to present on this topic. This session is completely free and available to all who would like to attend. It doesn’t get much better than that!
Register for free Power Pivot training
Power Pivot is a powerful yet flexible analytics tool built into a familiar environment yet many users remain unsure of how to take advantage of this dynamic tool. In this session, we’ll discuss the purpose of Power Pivot, where Power Pivot fits within your organization and the basics of designing a Power Pivot model that integrates disparate data sources with the goal of gaining previously unrecognized insight into key business metrics.
This free online training event is scheduled for Thursday September 10th at 12 pm CST/1 pm EST. If you’re interested in attending, all you need to do is RSVP here to let the organizers know you’re coming. It’s going to be a great event, a lot of fun and maybe even educational! 😉
After a couple months of fun with Power BI, I’ve picked up a few little tricks along the way that have helped me to be able to create some pretty cool data visualizations and dashboard reports. Here are five Power BI tips and tricks that you may find useful as you begin creating dashboards for your organization.
New to Power BI? Start here to get acquainted!
One of the ways we can create a KPI visualization is to use a pie or donut chart visualization, which you can see here.
In the chart above, I create a KPI to quickly display which tight ends score more than, less than or equal to the average number of touchdowns all tight ends scored last year allowing me to quickly identify tight ends that score more TDs than average.
Here is my calculated column to create the KPI value for you to have as an example:
TD KPI = if(int('TE Stats'[TD])>INT('TE Stats'[Avg TE TDs]),"1",IF(int('TE Stats'[TD])<int('TE Stats'[Avg TE TDs]),"-1","0"))
Then configure a pie chart as follows.
First, I place my KPI calculated column as the Legend and as the Values.
Then I hid all the labels and configured the colors to display red (-1), yellow(0) or green(1) depending on the value of the KPI.
Now when I use a slicer to select a player, my pie chart acts as a stoplight KPI. Cool!
I’ve previously blogged this tip before, but this one is too nifty to not share again, in my humble opinion. One of the advantages to using a visualization like a funnel chart as a slicer is you gain the ability to single-select a filter, which is something the current slicer lacks. Check out this post to learn more about leveraging Power BI’s natural cross filtering to create some pretty cool slicers.
A nice way to create a small trend line, also called a spark line, is to use a line chart visualization which you can see below.
This trick is pretty easy. Just create a normal line chart visualization, hide all the labels and shrink the chart down to the desired size.
Last week you may have seen my blog post on how to use a scatter graph to create a calendar chart. One of the ways you can improve the calendar scatter graph is to create the visualization along side a matrix visualization, as seen below.
You can use the matrix to display the names of the week below each day in the calendar and then also optionally display the totals by day.
The bar chart is a great visualization type to use in your Power BI dashboard because its so easy to differentiate the differences between the categories. But one of the problems with the visualization in Power BI is that sometimes its hard to see the categories on the y-axis if the chart is too small. See the image below to see an example the issue I’m talking about.
One way you can work around this is to right-align the y-axis. This will cause the full value of the y-axis categories to always be displayed in all their glory albeit on the right side.
You just have to live with the category labels on the right side of the bar chart.
Need more Power BI tips? Check out these tips:
Here’s three Power BI best practices to follow.
Power Pivot is an amazing, flexible and powerful business intelligence tool (among other things) and there is no doubt about that fact. As a feature included with Excel 2013 and 2016 (and an add-on for Excel 2010), Power Pivot allows user with a little technical expertise to integrate disparate data source together within a flexible data model. Once the data is loaded into Power Pivot, we easily have the ability to create powerful calculated measures, key performance indicators Continue reading Taking #PowerPivot to the Next Level
The Power BI August update just rolled out today (8/20/2015) and in the latest update there’s a lot of cool, new enhancements such as writing custom MDX or DAX queries to access your SSAS data sources, connectors for Azure HDInsight Spark and Azure SQL Data Warehouse (so awesome!), some various UI improvements and a bunch more. But one of the coolest features (and much needed IMHO) is that we now have the ability to import Excel artifacts, such as Power Pivot models and Power View reports straight into Power BI Desktop!
New to Power BI Desktop? Read this first!
To begin importing a Continue reading Importing Power Pivot & Power View into Power BI
The Scatter Chart in Power BI and Excel is very useful chart for visualizing three different metrics in tandem. But with a little bit of work you can use a Scatter Chart to create a Calendar chart for visualizing your metrics across the days of an individual month.
New to Power BI Desktop? Start here!
To configure a Scatter Chart too mimic a Calendar type report, you need the following: Continue reading Power BI Tip: Use a Scatter Chart to Create a Calendar Report
With SSIS 2014 and earlier there is currently not native way to refresh an Excel workbook which include Power Query queries. Now that functionality is rumored to be included with SQL Server 2016 but if you’re currently running SQL Server 2014 or 2012 you are out of luck. But that’s why Pragmatic Works put together the Excel Power Refresh component for SSIS.
Configuring the Excel Power Refresh Task is pretty straightforward. There’s not a lot of complexity to this component, which is a good thing.
First create a Connection Continue reading Refreshing Excel Power Query & Pivot Tables with SSIS and Task Factory
The Office 2016 Public Preview is now available for download! Included in the preview of Excel 2016 are a handful of new chart types and since I’m a huge fan of awesome data visualizations, I thought I’d take a few moments to play around with them and share my experience with you so you can have a better idea of what to expect in the next version of Excel. But to be honest, if you’re a data & visualizations nerd like me, you’re probably pretty excited! Continue reading Here’s the New #Excel 2016 Chart Types!
