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

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.

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 summary of the new features in the July 2018 update to Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 July 2018

This month sees features allowing you to change the appearance of the icons at the top right of each visual, and also to change the appearance of the wallpaper surrounding a report, but otherwise all of the enhancements are fairly minor.

Five methods for creating partitions of SSAS Tabular tables programmatically

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 July 2018

Need to generate a partition for a fact table for each year, product or region? This blog gives five approaches, so that you can choose which method is for you.

Using partitions/processing to load a large fact table into a tabular data model

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 July 2018

This blog shows how you can load the empty structure of a large fact table into an Analysis Services tabular data model, then use partitions to bring in the data bit by bit.

Some ideas for company days out!

Posted by Andy Brown on 18 June 2018

Go-karting, axe-throwing, escape rooms and ninja training - some of the ideas from this blog suggesting company days out in Manchester.

A summary of recent blogs that we've written on bookmarks in Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 18 June 2018

We've created a few blogs giving some ideas for how to use the new Power BI bookmarks features (including dynamic charts and enabling pagination). This blog brings the links together onto a single page.

Changes in the June 2018 Update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 09 June 2018

There are hardly any changes in this update - the only significant one is that you now sort and filter data within Power BI Desktop itself, rather than having to go into Query Editor.

A summary of new features added to Power BI Desktop in the May 2018 update

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 May 2018

New features introduced into Power BI Desktop in this update include conditional formatting by different fields, the inclusion of filters in drill-through and minor improvements to line and funnel charts.

Use the Excel camera tool, or create a linked picture in Word or PowerPoint

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 April 2018

This blog shows options for creating a webcam focused on one particular area of an Excel workbook! You can do this either by pasting the Excel range into PowerPoint or Word as a linked picture, or by using the Excel camera tool.

What is new in the April 2018 Power BI Desktop update

Posted by Andy Brown on 07 April 2018

This month's update allows users to add customisable buttons to a report, incorporates a numeric slicer and includes a few other smaller changes.

New features in the March 2018 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 March 2018

By far the biggest new feature in the March 2018 update of Power BI Desktop is bookmarks (so big, in fact, that it gets a summary treatment in this blog and a separate, longer blog all to itself).

How to get rid of lots of blank rows in a Report Builder table

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 February 2018

There seems to be an occasional bug in Report Builder which fills a table with blank rows. Here's one owl's way to get round it.