Wise Owl Blogs - Home (page 1 of 20)

The April 2019 update to Power BI has many good features, as this blog explains

Posted by Andy Brown on 18 April 2019

The April 2019 update to Power BI introduces a new concept: the ability to make the value of a property dynamic. Other welcome new changes include M Intellisense, data profiling in query editor and cross-report drill-down.

A new acronym for the order of SQL keywords

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 March 2019

Someone has finally won our competition to think of a better acronym for the order of keywords in SQL, we're pleased to announce.

The March 2019 update of Power BI allows you to create multiple table layouts

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 March 2019

In addition to all of the wonderful new features in the March 2019 Power BI update that I blogged about yesterday, you can also create multiple database relationship diagrams (or layouts).

Read about the many new features introduced in the March 2019 update

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 March 2019

This is the biggest single update for some time, introducing the new modelling view, tooltip styling, single-select slicers and much more besides.

Getting Started with Power BI Report Server

Posted by Andrew Gould on 19 March 2019

Power BI encourages you to publish reports to an online service so that you can share your beautiful reports with the world. If you'd rather keep them a secret you can use Power BI Report Server to deploy your reports to an on-premises server, as this blog series shows you.

The mysteries of context transition explained

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 25 February 2019

Context transition happens when a DAX function creates filter context within row context, or vice versa. This blog explains what context transition is, and shows which DAX functions make use of it.

Changes to Power BI in the January and February 2019 updates

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 February 2019

There wasn't an official January update, although there were improvements announced to Power BI Service. This blog lists these, and also new features to wrap titles in visuals, apply rounded corners and change the default way in which visuals interact with each other.

Understanding row context in DAX

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 01 February 2019

Row context (along with its sibling, filter context) is one of the most important concepts in DAX. This blog explains what row context is, and how to use it!

Understanding filter context in DAX

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 28 January 2019

Understanding filter context is the key to understanding how to create measures in DAX. This blog aims to explain this vital subject as succinctly as possible!

Creating reports in Power BI with dynamic measures or dynamic dimensions

Posted by Andy Brown on 03 January 2019

This blog shows how to create fully dynamic reports, whereby users can choose which statistics to show and which dimensions to report them by.

A summary of changes in the Power BI December 2018 update

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 December 2018

This is a small update, but a very welcome one! You can now (finally) zoom in the DAX editing window, and also use smart guides to align visuals. There are also other minor cosmetic and keyboard updates.

Showing the top N values of a dimension, where you can use a slicer to vary N

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 December 2018

Following a question from a Power BI course, this blog shows how you can get a page to show the top N customers by sales value, where N is a number controlled by a slicer.

New features in the November 2018 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 26 November 2018

A big new update this month, including expandable row headings in matrices, copying and pasting between visuals and conditional formatting of charts (although it's what's waiting in preview which will really blow your mind).

How to monitor stock levels from forecast sales using DAX measures in Power BI

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 06 November 2018

Given your current stock levels and forecast sales, it should be possible to report on future stock depletion in Power BI. This two-part blog shows you how to just that!

Some useful links for finding topoJSON files to be used in Power BI shape maps

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 October 2018

If you're lucky (?) enough to live in the United States, you won't have a problem with shape map files; if you live in the UK, you may find these links useful!

A summary of the new features in the October 2018 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 19 October 2018

Not an earth-shaking update, but lots of nice new features nonetheless to make your life easier, including a better DAX editor, the ability to search for text when filtering a visual and a clever new connector which guesses what you want to import from a website.

A summary of the new features introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 September 2018

The September update of Power BI finally breathes life into report page tooltips, which have been in limbo for a while. You can also copy data from Power BI reports by right-clicking, use some keyboard short-cuts for visual design, apply built-in themes, set fixed-width padding by column example and show categories on the X axis of scatter charts.

A way to get 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to co-exist on the same computer

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 September 2018

A (very) short blog containing a link to an article showing how you can import data from Access using SSAS or SSIS on a 64-bit computer

A run-through the new features in the August update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 August 2018

This is a bigger update than most, largely because it includes two major new features emerging from preview (report themes and desktop Q&A), but it's the export to PDF feature which really catches the eye.

A DAX formatter to tidy up your code

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 30 July 2018

Use this handy web based formatter to turn shameful code into neat DAX!