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Power BI blogs from Wise Owl (page 1 of 4)
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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!).
Creating complex custom date periods in calendar tables using calculated columns
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 17 May 2019
This blog shows how to create custom date periods within a date table for 28 day cycles, but the principles shown could be applied to create any custom date periods.
Creating a calendar or date table in Power BI using built-in calendar functions
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 17 May 2019
Learn how to create a basic date table in Power BI, using either the CALENDAR or CALENDARAUTO functions, and also learn how to then add custom columns of your own.
Modelling a fixed or variable custom financial year in Power BI
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 17 May 2019
Whether your financial year ends on a fixed date every year or on the first Monday in June, this blog will show you how to incorporate it into your calendar table.
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.
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.
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 ... !