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Power BI blogs from Wise Owl (page 1 of 4)
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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 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!
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 30 July 2018
Learn to use DAX variables, and understand how they can be used to break up code. Not true debugging, but better than nothing!
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.
How to show current drilldown filters in Power BI Desktop
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 20 July 2018
Some technique to remind users what levels they chose while using drilldown.
Stop automatic grouping in Power BI Desktop
Posted by Sam Lowrie on 20 July 2018
Read this blog to understand the risk of Power BI's automatic grouping of data, and to learn how to avoid getting caught out!
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 ... !