Wise Owl blogs written by Andy Brown (page 1 of 15)

New features introduced in the May 2019 update of Power BI

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 May 2019

There's not much new in this month's update. The Performance Analyzer is a great idea, for working out which bits of your report are running slowly, but all of the other changes are minor (as you'll see if you read this blog!).

Wise Owl have found one SQL structure which slows down code more than any other

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 May 2019

If your stored procedures or SQL queries are running slowly, don't bother looking at correlated subqueries, cursors, functions or any of the other usual culprits. There's one SQL syntax which Wise Owl have found to be an order of magnitude worse than any other, as this blog shows.

Changes made to the main Office applications from Office 2016 up to May 2019

Posted by Andy Brown on 10 May 2019

To prepare the way for the start of a monthly Office update on this website, this long blog lists the changes made to Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word between the release of Office 2016 and May 2019.

A new booking system for Wise Owl public courses!

Posted by Andy Brown on 09 May 2019

We've introduced a new online booking system for our public course places, although only 50% of people (chosen at random) will see it. This blog explains the reasoning behind the new system, and the benefits it offers.

The five biggest OOH! moments on an Excel training course.

Posted by Andy Brown on 09 May 2019

All trainers live for that moment when someone's face lights up, as they learn something new which will change their working life for the better. This blog lists the 5 biggest such OOH moments from our Excel training courses. How many of these tips do you know?

A summary of the main new features in Visual Studio 2019 for BI developers

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 May 2019

Visual Studio 2019 has a different look (particularly for creating new projects), but Wise Owl can't see any compelling reason to upgrade.

Changes that BI developers can expect from SQL Server 2019

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 May 2019

SQL Server 2019 is not out yet (it's scheduled for release in the second half of 2019), but this blog shows what changes you can expect to see.

Mapping stored procedure parameters to SSRS parameters

Posted by Andy Brown on 02 May 2019

This blog explains why you might want to use the PARAMETERS tab in the Dataset Properties dialog box in SSRS.

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.

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.

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).

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.