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Power BI blogs from Wise Owl (page 1 of 6)
Showing blogs 1-20 (out of 115)
How to save a Power Apps app to a local drive, and then open it
Posted by Andy Brown on 19 September 2020
This blog shows a simple way to export a Power Apps app without creating a solution. If you've got a fairly simple app without too many resources or data sources, it describes a much easier way to back up and restore apps than the standard export/import approach.
An overview of what Power Apps is and does, for beginners
Posted by Andy Brown on 25 August 2020
What IS Power Apps? In this blog we try to convey the essence of this enjoyable product, so you can make the decision of whether to invest in it.
There are no significant changes to Power BI in the August 2020 update
Posted by Andy Brown on 22 August 2020
Notwithstanding an update blog from Microsoft, there are no interesting new Power BI Desktop features to report this month (in our humble opinon).
A correction - report tooltips can be any size in a Power BI report
Posted by Andy Brown on 08 August 2020
Sadly we do occasionally make mistakes in our training, but when this happens we always try to correct them. Here, we explain that Power BI report page tooltips can in fact be any size.
Happy 5th birthday to Power BI Desktop!
Posted by Andy Brown on 23 July 2020
Power BI Desktop went on general release on 24th July 2015. This short blog looks back nostalgically at milestones for both Power BI and Wise Owl.
Changes in the July 2020 update to Power BI Desktop
Posted by Andy Brown on 23 July 2020
This month's modest update allows you to use Excel financial functions in DAX, show a gradient legend and change your slicer header, among other minor changes.
Changes for the June 2020 update of Power BI Desktop
Posted by Andy Brown on 28 June 2020
This month's update doesn't include many changes - the biggest being probably the emergence of the hierarchical slicer from preview.
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 26 June 2020
Sam was tired of getting told off for crinkled or missing expense receipts. So he had a look at Power Apps and this is what he found…
What's new in the May 2020 Power BI update
Posted by Andy Brown on 24 May 2020
The May 2020 update is a good one! The decomposition tree is a seriously good new visual, drop shadows are a nice idea well-implemented, and there are lots of improvements to the way buttons look and work.
Our take on the April update to Power BI (announced on May 6th!)
Posted by Andy Brown on 09 May 2020
It was announced 6 days after the end of the month, but the April 2020 update to Power BI was worth waiting for - if only for the fact that you can now select visuals by clicking and dragging with the mouse. See our take on the new features in this update in the latest in our series of monthly update blogs.
Add the ComicGen custom visual to your Power BI reports to spice them up!
Posted by Andy Brown on 27 April 2020
The ComicGen custom visual allows you to show one of two characters (Dee or Dey) in a variety of poses, and with a range of emotions. Excitingly, the poses and emotions can depend on your data, making these the most human of KPIs. Find out more in this blog!
The mighty MapBox visual for Power BI
Posted by Marie Woltman on 27 April 2020
Marie Woltman is a Power BI guru whose maps we often reference on our courses. In this blog she explains why MapBox is her preferred mapping tool, and shows how to use it to create custom styles and layers.
The March 2020 update to Power BI desktop is a full one, as this blog shows!
Posted by Andy Brown on 14 March 2020
New goodies in this month's update include the roll-out (sort of) of the new ribbon, new actions for buttons, multi-column sorting and a second axis for line charts.
How to show rows with no corresponding data in a Power BI visual
Posted by Andy Brown on 12 March 2020
This modest blog explains how you can tell Power BI to show all of the members of a dimension table (even the ones which have no corresponding data).
The February 2020 update only contains one big change - incremental refresh
Posted by Andy Brown on 29 February 2020
The February 2020 Power BI update only really introduces one new feature - the ability to partition your data so that Power BI only needs to refresh the most recent changes.
Sam attended our first Power BI meetup at the end of January, and was impressed!
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 29 February 2020
A summary of what happened in the Power BI meet-up at the end of January, from a convert (Sam).
Our series of Simple Talk tutorials on using DAX within Power BI is now complete
Posted by Andy Brown on 13 February 2020
Simple Talk provide excellent how-to guides on any aspect of Microsoft software. We are proud to have contributed a series of articles explaining how to create DAX calculated columns and measures within Power BI.
A placeholder for the January 2020 Power BI Update
Posted by Andy Brown on 16 January 2020
The January 2020 Power BI update isn't out yet, but we will blog about it here as soon as it is announced.
Revelations about Power BI - hiding preview and left-click drill-through
Posted by Andy Brown on 10 January 2020
When we find new features which we didn't know about, we try to share them! Did you know that you can turn preview off when getting data? Or that you could left-click to drill-through? We didn't!
A summary of the main changes introduced in the December 2019 Power BI update
Posted by Andy Brown on 23 December 2019
The December 2019 update allows you to customise your visuals pane and format KPIs better, but that's almost it!
Hi Andy,
I'm a little confused about Power BI. Looking at your videos, it seems Power BI is a collective term for PowerPivot, Power Query, Power Map, etc.
However, googling Power BI, I see this, where the video shows a completely independent tool aimed at creating dashboards and reports, so can you please clarify what is Power BI? Thanks.
Microsoft haven't helped with their naming convention! They keep changing what Power BI refers to. Here's where we're at now ...
Power BI is a standalone desktop product, previously known as Power BI Desktop. You can use these to create reports, and publish them to the web.
PowerPivot runs within Excel, and allows you to link different data sources together to create a data model, and use this as a basis for pivot tables. PowerPivot used to be one of the Microsoft Power BI tools, but they seem to have quietly dropped this title.
So when Microsoft refer to Power BI, they now refer to creating reports in the standalone Power BI application, perhaps using Power BI Pro, and publishing these to the Internet.
Hope that's clear ... !