Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup for July 27, 2020

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Patrick LeBlanc has a great, short introduction to Tabular Editor by showing you how create new measures in your model super fast!

 

Well, I guess Microsoft hadn't renamed anything in a while, so they decided to rename the Common Data Service to Microsoft Dataflex.

 

Here's the May and June 2020 feature summary for the Power BI service and mobile. Much of this has been announced before individually, so this is a good refresher of what has happened in the last couple months.

 

Reid Havens has a short video showing you the new gradient legend feature in Power BI Desktop.

 

If you need to track logins into Power BI, say, for auditing or regulatory purposes, you should check out this article from Blue Granite.

Weekly Roundup for July 20, 2020

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The July 2020 update of Power BI Desktop is out!

 

This is super cool! If you are a hardcore Power BI user, then you will want this update. Power BI Desktop now supports external tools like DAX Studio and Tabular Editor.

 

Marc Lelijveld has put together a really thorough look at the pros and cons of Power BI Deployment Pipelines. It's a good read for anyone thinking of using them.

 

Calculation groups are finally here in Power BI Desktop, and I can think of no one from whom I would rather learn of it than Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari!

 

Huh, well that's interesting! You can add tooltips and table metadata right inside Power Query.

Weekly Roundup for June 29, 2020

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I love the new page navigation capability in Power Bi. It is so much simpler than the button navigation. I have replaced them with this capability in all my reports!

 

About 2 months ago, Microsoft bought Softomotive, which will give them significant capabilities in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This will be a natural complement to a tool like Power Automate, and it is now available in your UI flows.

 

You always have to keep an eye out for high-cardinality columns in your data model. Datetime columns are frequent culprits at this and will make your data models large and non-performant.

 

If you are going to build a (true) data warehouse, Agile is a great tool to keep the project on track and to reach value sooner. This is a really great article covering what to think about when starting a new Agile data warehousing effort.

 

I am constantly preaching to my clients the benefits of a self-service BI strategy. 1. Enabling the business to move at their own speed; 2. Getting the business more involved in their own data; and 3. Getting to insights faster than your competitors.

 

I couldn't agree more! When designing and building a BI data model, you really must make the names of the tables, columns, and calculated measures "client facing" (i.e., client friendly) from the beginning. This is crucial; otherwise, you will end up with a BI solution that no one wants to use.

Weekly Roundup for June 22, 2020

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It's always a good idea to add a date(time) showing the last refresh of your dataset when building out a report.

 

My clients have regularly asked me whether they need Power BI or paginated reporting. My answer, much like the grocery store customer being asked whether they would like paper or plastic: "Yes!" Rob Collie explains why each is better at different things and, thus, why both are necessary.

 

If you are looking to turn on Power BI Premium in your workspace in the near future, be sure to check this out.

 

Colors can oftentimes be used to draw a user's eyes to something on which you want them to focus or to quickly draw conclusions, such as up or down, good or bad. Reid Havens at Havens Consulting has a great idea for using conditional formatting for shadow colors.

 

Blue Granite has a really thorough article explaining what you should be think about when choosing an enterprise business intelligence solution.

Weekly Roundup for June 15, 2020

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One of the most common mistakes that can occur while building a Power BI model is a loss of "referential integrity". That's a fancy way of saying that you have a one-to-many relationship with data on your many side that doesn't map up to data on the one side.

 

If you're not using data sensitivity labels and data protection capabilities across your enterprise, you should really start looking at that. This is an important step in identifying and protecting your most sensitive data.

 

Adam Saxton walks you through all the upcoming changes to Power BI workspaces.

 

Chris Webb has an interesting article on using Parameters and Deployment Pipelines to limit the amount of data you are handling inside Power BI Desktop (and, thus, on your local machine). If you are using large models, this will prove very useful.

 

If you have non-performant direct query models, Brett Powell shows you how to speed them up...and reduce the load on the source server.

 

Meagan Longoria has a fun article to remind you that your data visualizations always need to take context into account. Here, she talks about both the data and the important information behind the data.

 

Every month, Microsoft releases several new features for Power BI. Some are small, and some are game changers. Marc Lelijveld put together a thoughtful strategy for how an organization might phase their roll-out of those new features, so that they can take into account functionality, data governance, etc.

 

If you ever needed an introduction to Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop, Dan Szepesi has a good breakdown.

 

John White has a kind of ingenious way of creating low-code data-driven subscriptions by combining the Power BI REST API with Power Automate and SharePoint.

Weekly Roundup for June 8, 2020

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Adam Saxton shows you all about the new deployment pipelines in Power BI. (Note: Premium only.)

 

Dan Szepesi at Blue Granite has some basic steps you should go through when you want to improve the performance of your model.

1. Turn auto date table

2. Remove unnecessary columns

3. Star schema

 

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari have some really interesting ideas about how to upgrade the DAX language to make it simpler for novice DAX writers just starting out.

 

If you ever wanted to learn about DAX Studio or how to optimize your DAX model, check out this four-part series by http://PowerBI.tips with Darren Gosbell and Marco Russo.

 

Paul Turley used a Power BI A4 (embedded, purchased through Azure, billed by the hour) to work with the new XMLA Read/Write endpoint. I can't wait to play around with it!