If you’ve been at least paying attention to my blog a little bit, you’ve probably noticed I occasionally blog about Power BI. Part of the reason I blog so often about Power BI is because that’s the topic of a whole bunch of conversations I’m having with my customers. The other reason is that the customer I’m speaking with have lots of questions about Power BI. So consider this one of my efforts at scaling myself.
If you enjoy this “Power BI tips and tricks” type posts, check out my first five Power BI tips and then my second five Power BI tips. You’ll probably enjoy those if you found this post helpful. So without further ado, I present to you more Power BI tips that I truly hope you’ll find helpful.
For my second time, I was afforded the great opportunity to present virtually to the great people of the Madison Power BI User Group. I’m always really excited when someone invites me back a second time to speak because that means that the first time wasn’t completely awful! We had a great time last evening discussing Continue reading Introduction to Power BI Desktop – Session Materials Available→
This week I was working on a project for a school up North. This customer wanted to use Power BI and map visualizations to view the locations of the various school buildings in the district. The problem for this very large school district was that they were missing the street address information for some of the buildings and for other buildings they were missing the latitude and longitude.
The good news is that Power Query in Power BI is flexible enough for us to take advantage of the Bing Maps API so that we can lookup the missing pieces of information we need. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can use the Bing Maps API to look up an address based on a latitude and longitude or use a street address to find a latitude and longitude for the location. Continue reading Power BI and the Bing Maps API→
As a Data Platform Solution Architect for Microsoft, one of my jobs is to help teach my customers what our amazing tools can do and how those tools work. Interest in Power BI is blowing up and I’m seeing most of my customers express huge interest in this awesome tool. To help facilitate the conversation about how Power BI works and how it can help my customers, I put together this diagram.
Also, each text block in the black area to the right includes a link to the documentation on PowerBI.com for the specific component. So if I’m looking at the diagram and I want to gather more information on the Power BI Gateway – Enterprise, just click the text block or point #2. Continue reading Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram→
There were so many updates to Power BI this month I thought I’d put all the links to the information on the updates in one place so we can get caught up quickly on everything that changed with the tool this month. Down below you’ll find my commentary on which updates I’m most excited about and links to the Power BI blog to get all the information on all the changes!
The big one here, in my opinion, is the ability to use custom visuals! Not only can you create your own visualizations to meet your organization’s needs, you can download other custom visualizations that have been shared in the Power BI Visuals Gallery. Some of these custom visuals are just awesome. The capabilities of this tool are off the charts (see what I did there?)!
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→
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 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.
