Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup for October 19, 2020

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Deployment pipelines, one of the biggest updates to Power BI in the last year, are now generally available.

 

David Ruijter has a really neat toolset to compare all of your datasets in Power BI to best practices using Tabular Editor and PowerShell.

 

I will be presenting at SQL Saturday 1000, Oregon 2020 on Saturday, October 24, at 5:30 PM PDT. I'll be talking about the basics of data modeling for BI reporting. Be sure to check it out!

We all start using business intelligence tools by using a single dataset, like a flat file. Then, we hit a plateau in our learning curve, or we add a second flat file into our BI product, and we get incorrect results. One reason is that we haven't modeled our solution correctly.

In order to move to the next level of our journey along the BI learning curve, we need to understand how a tool like Power BI works. Only then will we understand why we design our data models the way we do.

In this session, we will review how tools like Power BI work under the covers and how that impacts the way we construct our data models. This is an introductory level course, so we will not get too technical, just enough to get us to the next level and moving back up that learning curve!

 

Here is a great summary of all the Power BI-related announcements at Microsoft Ignite.

 

Be sure to join us on Tuesday, November 17, for a presentation I’ve wanted to see for quite some time now: Source Control with Power BI. It will be lead by William Butler, Senior Data Architect at myNEXUS. No doubt, it will be extremely informative.

 

I think this is really interesting, tremendously useful for a very small group of people, and otherwise flash in the pan…..but, hey, it’s cool!

 

Shabnam Watson has an article that offers a good reminder that, if you only need date and not time, don't bring it in, and if you must, separate them out.

 

I’m really excited about the upcoming Power BI Premium Per User license. It will make available to small organizations like myself functionality that is currently limited to larger enterprises. One question still outstanding: How much will it cost?

 

Reid Havens has a great video showing you how to leave your users breadcrumbs when using Drillthrough. This will really enhance their user experience.

 

The Power Platform Customer Advisory Team (CAT) has a new series out on how to architect a Power Platform solution. If you are building one of any size, or leading a team, this is definitely worth checking out.

Weekly Roundup for September 28, 2020

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The September 2020 update to Power BI Desktop is out!

 

Join us online for a terrific presentation by Microsoft MVP Chris Wagner,
Analytics Architect, Mentor, Leader, and Visionary.

Chris has been working in the Data and Analytics space for nearly 20 years. Chris has dedicated his professional career to making data and information accessible to the masses. A significant component in making data available is continually learning new things and teaching others from these experiences. To help people keep up with this ever-changing landscape, Chris frequently posts on LinkedIn and to his blog.

Come hear a talk you've likely never heard anywhere else: The Meyers Briggs Personality Types You Find in a Self-Service BI Platform. Chris will walk you through how people's different personality traits impact their relationship with data, and what that means for the creators of self-service BI solutions.

The talk is free, virtual, and open to the public. Just sign up and join the Zoom conference on Thursday, October 15, at 11:30 AM Central.

 

There is now a connector on the Power Platform for Azure API Management. That means that, if your enterprise has invested resources in building APIs in Azure, you can now expose them easily through a common connector to your citizen developers.

 

I have so many clients who would love to see this right now! They export their visuals to a PowerPoint document and add context…manually. With Smart Narrative, you can now do that right inside your Power BI report. Depending on how well this works, this could be huge!

Weekly Roundup for September 21, 2020

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You can now use Power Automate to export Power BI reports and paginated reports in the Power BI Service.

 

The Power BI Service is getting a UI refresh. I guess I better get familiar with the new design.

Microsoft and Databricks: Top 5 Modern Data Platform Features — Part 1

Megan Quinn with BlueGranite has a really interesting article out about two major updates to Databricks: Spark 3.0 and Delta Engine. I’m looking forward to Part 2, in which she will cover enhancements from Microsoft.

 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to create a Date Table without access to one in a database, recreating it in PowerQuery. What happens when your fact tables have dates with different minimums and maximums? How do you handle that? Soheil Bakhshi has a PQ command that can help with that.

 

Best practices for enterprise-grade Power Automate and PowerApps solutions necessitate having different environments for each solution and even, at times, different environments for Development, QA, UAT, Prod, etc. Moving changes from one environment to another has always been tedious. It is about to get much easier!

Weekly Roundup for September 14, 2020

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Personalized visuals give your users the ability to consume your reports the way they want to. Patrick LeBlanc has a great, thorough walk through for Power BI perspectives.

 

Steve Cardella with BlueGranite gives a high-level overview of how to structure a data lake. If you are looking at creating a data lake within your organization, give it a quick read.

 

Patrick LeBlanc revisits his next-level date picker and takes it up a level!

 

Microsoft has a best-practices document for mission-critical, or production-level, Power Automate flows.

 

Last week, Belinda Allen gave a terrific presentation to the Nashville Modern Excel & Power BI User Group, talking about the state of AI in Power BI Desktop. One of our avid attendees asked her if you can use the Q&A visual to query about a range in a numerical field—in this case, an integer age field. You can see her answer in her Tiny Tips video here.

Weekly Roundup for September 7, 2020

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Alberto Ferrari is out with a really thorough article and a great video explaining how to use calculation groups to selectively replace measures in your DAX expressions. This is something my clients ask me about routinely. Hear it from the expert!

 

The latest update is out for Power BI Paginated Reports. There’s now Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication support for Azure SQL DB and Azure Synapse Analytics, and there’s support for the Common Data Service, along with a couple other updates.

 

BlueGranite has a really good list of 10 tips to think about when looking to implement Power BI within an organization. It is in both written and video (11 minutes) form.

Weekly Roundup for August 31, 2020

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If you have a big model in Excel PowerPivot, you can still connect DAX Studio to it. Patrick LeBlanc has you covered.

 

I’m always interested in new ways to show information. Chris Webb shows you how to display routes on a map in Power BI. Not an everyday usage, but nice to know it’s there!

 

I keep telling my clients not to use the auto date table functionality in Power BI. If you want to know why, Adam Saxton shows you just how costly these can be.

Weekly Roundup for August 24, 2020

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Belinda Allen, Microsoft MVP and leader of the Charleston Power BI User Group, will be presenting on the state of AI in Power BI Desktop on Thursday, September 10. I've seen this presentation before, and it was truly informative. Be sure not to miss this one!

 

The October Release Wave 2 updates for PowerApps are out.

 

I didn’t realize that the August 2020 version of Power BI Desktop has a Power Query function called Table.AddFuzzyClusterColumn. This is a great way to clean up dirty data, and would be best used in Dataflows, so that you only have to clean up the data once. Daniil Maslyuk has a brief introduction to the new function.

 

When using the Analyze in Excel function of Power BI, any data sensitivity labels used in the dataset to which Excel is connected will now flow through to the Excel pivot interface.

 

For several years now, you have been able to import an existing PowerPivot model in Excel straight into Power BI for an instant dataset. Patrick LeBlanc shows you how to do this in both Desktop and the Service along some best practices.

 

External Tools is perhaps the biggest update to Power BI Desktop since it came out. It really is revolutionary within the Power BI authoring experience. PowerBI.tips has several additional external tools. They’re definitely pushing their website, but it’s worth checking out.

Weekly Roundup for August 17, 2020

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The August 2020 version of Power BI Desktop is out!

 

The Italians (Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo) are out with the second edition of their great DAX Patterns book. This should be in the toolkit of every Microsoft BI professional.

 

Matt Allington gives you a strategy for fixing erroneous data in Power BI.

  1. Fix the source

  2. Self-referencing tables

  3. Using override tables

 

I keep mentioning how you should use master, or “promoted”, datasets and then reuse those datasets for all your BI needs. Reid Havens has a quick video up showing you how to take an existing .pbix file and accomplish that in minutes.

 

Patrick LeBlanc has this great 3-minute video showing you 3 tricks of Power Query. Definitely pay attention to #3. It’s a great way to comment your code, and the comments surface both in the advanced editor and in the transformation steps.

Weekly Roundup for August 10, 2020

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Calculation groups are a great new addition to Power BI. Patrick LeBlanc gives you a terrific introduction.

 

For anyone who is looking for better Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) offerings for PowerApps and Power Platform solutions, this should be very helpful.

 

In the Power BI Service, you can now block the creation of classic workspaces. Please, please, please do this!

 

Excel is a great tool for exploring your semantic model (i.e., your Power BI dataset). Now, you can connect directly to a dataset in Power BI Desktop, whereas before you could only connect to a dataset in the Service. Now, you don't have to publish your changes to explore their impact.

 

Belinda Allen has a new video series out where she is sharing Tiny Tips. If you are new on your Power BI journey, or even if you’re not, give them a watch. She is an incredibly talented instructor. Here, she is giving her tips on formatting the matrix visual in Power BI Desktop.

Weekly Roundup for August 3, 2020

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I really enjoyed reading about Matthew Roche's history with certification exams. If you've got a few minutes, give it a gander!

 

CSG has a new DAX series on YouTube. If you're looking to learn DAX, you might want to give it a try.

 

Marc Lelijveld has created an external Power BI tool for documenting your model. This could be a great resource for source control and CI/CD efforts.

 

If you ever wanted to take your report drill-through to the next level, Patrick LeBlanc shows you how to do it!