Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup for March 15, 2021

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In case you missed it, Matthew Roche presented at the Nashville Modern Excel & Power BI User Group on Creating a Data Culture with Power BI. Fun, witty, entertaining, and tremendously valuable. If you missed it, be sure to check out the recording.

 

Patrick LeBlanc has a great idea for creating notifications. This example uses Excel for developers to document changes to reports, and that materializes in the report so that report consumers can see the latest updates.

 

I have to admit, I didn’t realize you could do this. Whenever Power BI auto-generates relationships in my models, I always have to check them and often have to fix them. This varies from useless to downright frustrating. Reza Rad shows a quick tip to stop Power BI from doing this. I’ll use this for all my Power BI models from now on.

 

Adam Saxton has created a great introductory video for you to share with any end users new to Power BI.

 

Reid Havens shows you how to add adjustable bands to a line chart. I thought this was an interesting trick.

 

Patrick LeBlanc gives some great suggestions for people struggling with creating DAX measures.

Weekly Roundup for March 8, 2021

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Be sure to check out the March meetup of the Nashville Modern Excel & Power BI User Group at 11:30 AM CST. Matthew Roche, Principal Program Manager of the Power BI CAT at Microsoft, will be speaking on building a data culture with Power BI. You won’t want to miss this one!

 

Microsoft has released a list of learning resources for Power Automate. It includes beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Definitely a good resource, no matter your sophistication with Power Automate.

 

Microsoft has just released Power Fx, the Excel-like language behind PowerApps, making it open source. It can now be used across the Power Platform and incorporated into more solutions.

 

Microsoft is now giving away Power Automate Desktop for free on Windows 10!

 

Power BI Premium Per User is now generally available and the price is $20/user/month. If you already have a Power BI license—for example, through an Office 365 E5 license—then it is just an additional $10/user/month.

 

Power BI Premium Gen 2 is now previewing an autoscaling feature that allows your Premium node to expand cores as necessary based on compute demand, and you are only billed for the excess cores on a 24-hour basis.

 

Patrick LeBlanc shows you how to quickly change data sources in Power Query. I literally had a client ask me about this just last week.

 

Insight Quest has a collection of PowerShell scripts for common admin tasks. This is great tool for efficiency for anyone working as an admin of a Power BI capacity.

Weekly Roundup for March 1, 2021

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The February 2021 feature summary for Power BI is out. If you haven’t seen it, be sure to check it out.

 

Marc Lelijveld has a really interesting (but technical) article on using PowerShell to refresh only a single table in a data model.

 

Patrick LeBlanc demonstrates the Best Practice Analyzer in Tabular Editor. If you design data models, be sure to check this out.

 

Patrick LeBlanc explains what a star schema is and why you should be designing your data models using one.

 

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari have a thorough article out detailing circular dependencies in DAX. This is the kind of article that shows why they are the best at this stuff.

Weekly Roundup for February 22, 2021

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Microsoft published a a white paper detailing the security enhancements of the last year. If you are a Power BI admin, or just a Power BI user, this is definitely worth a read.

 

Alberto Ferrari gives a great introduction to case sensitivity in DAX.

 

Gartner has released its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence. Microsoft keeps pulling away from the pack.

 

The SQLBI team (Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari, et al) have created a web tool called DAX.do. You can navigate there to try out sample DAX measures and techniques without needing an existing data model.

 

Patrick LeBlanc has a great introduction to slowly changing dimensions.

Weekly Roundup for February 15, 2021

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Microsoft is out with a summary of recent updates to PowerApps for January 2021. Be sure to check out:

  • Source code files for canvas apps

  • Intelligence in relevance searches

  • Push notifications

  • AI Builder GA

 

There’s a new Contoso app for Power BI Embedded. It looks like they’ve put a lot more focus on this project, as they have, among other things, included the source code.

 

Microsoft has published the 2021 Wave 1 release preview for PowerApps. If you do anything at all with PowerApps, or are just PowerApps-curious, be sure to check it out.

 

Patrick LeBlanc gives you a quick primer on the basics of data modeling. This is a must-watch for anyone working in Power BI.

Weekly Roundup for February 8, 2021

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Microsoft came out with a white paper on best practices for Power BI. Definitely worth a read!

 

Adam Saxton gives an updated primer on the differences between Import mode, DirectQuery mode, and Live Connections.

 

A few months ago, Microsoft released Power BI Premium Gen 2. Now, they are bringing those enhancements to Power BI Embedded.

 

Adam Saxton continues his “back to basics” tour of Power BI with slicers and the filter pane. If you need an intro to them, he does a good job breaking it down.

Weekly Roundup for February 1, 2021

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The Power BI 2021 Release Wave 1 is out!

 

If you’re Power BI-curious and want a good place to start, Adam Saxton shows you how to create your first report.

 

If you’re a Power BI admin and want to know what data protection offerings Microsoft provides, here’s a good run down.

 

Gregory Petrossian has a terrific, thorough review of the differences in Power BI licensing.

 

I’ve been saying for years that you should always try, as much as possible, to push your transformations as far upstream as feasible. Within Power BI, that means using query folding to push data changes back to the source. One problem with that has always been that it is opaque the things that break query folding, making it difficult to construct well-architected queries without writing them from scratch. Now Power Query Online (and, soon, Power Query Desktop) will have an icon for each step indicating whether that step will fold, making it much easier to craft performant queries.

 

Incremental refresh is critical for enterprise-grade business intelligence or any report that is consuming large amounts of data. Patrick LeBlanc gives shows you how to do that. (Premium or Premium-per-User is required.)

Weekly Roundup for January 25, 2021

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On Thursday, January 21, Meagan Longoria presented to the Nashville Modern Excel & Power BI User Group on Practical Application of Storytelling Techniques in Power BI. You can check out the recording of her presentation here and her slide deck here.

 

Alberto Ferrari explains a new DAX capability released in December 2020, DEFINE COLUMN.

 

Reza Rad has a basic introduction to how an enterprise should think about structuring their workspaces.

 

Ron Ellis Gaut at CSG is kicking off a series of articles on DevOps. I thought this was an interesting read and hope they will cover the best practices of DevOps for the data analytics and BI teams.

 

Patrick LeBlanc gives you a quick primer on the GUI for Power Query. If you aren’t that familiar with it, it’s definitely a good place to start.

Weekly Roundup for January 18, 2021

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You can now add push notifications to your model-driven PowerApps apps!

 

CSG Pro has a really interesting article about what they see as the data analytics trends that will dominate 2021.

 

In case you needed a sales pitch to your IT team on why they should let you use PowerApps, Microsoft basically put it in a white paper for you.

 

There are a lot of use cases where you want a pixel-perfect solution, and in the Microsoft ecosystem, that’s paginated reports. This is a really useful tool, and Patrick LeBlanc demystifies it for you.

 

This is the biggest update for PowerApps for which I have been waiting for the last two years. You can now view and edit the source code for your PowerApps, meaning you can add the code to your source control repository. This closes the biggest gap between no-code, low-code and traditional app development.

Weekly Roundup for January 11, 2021

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Chris Webb has a link to an interesting GitHub project where you query Power BI Premium (and Azure Analysis Services) via HTTP.

 

In November, Databricks introduced SQL Analytics. BlueGranite gives a quick overview of this and why it will be really important.

 

If you ever wanted to show, in a table, the top N items and a final row for “Others”, Alberto Ferrari shows you how to accomplish this in Power BI with some clever DAX.

 

Reza Rad has a terrific article explaining the different types of Power BI users, from central model developers to end-users.

 

Marc Lelijveld has a set of PowerShell scripts to export dataset- and dataflow- refresh metrics that you can then visualize for better management. This is great for Power BI admins.