Wise Owl Training - Power BI blogs (page 1 of 6)

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.

Writing an App in Power Apps

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!

A preview of what the feature to customise themes within Power BI will look like

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 December 2019

Power BI is getting a built-in facility to edit themes, although it is currently still in preview. This blog shows what you can expect.

Pin the tail on the reindeer, Power BI style

Posted by Andy Brown on 12 December 2019

You have 3 attempts to pin the tail on the (slightly caustic) reindeer, a game created by Sam as a Power BI report.

There are few changes in the November 2019 update of Power BI

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 November 2019

The only significant change to Power BI for the November 2019 update is the introduction of conditional formatting for buttons, although there are exciting things now waiting in preview.

A new Power BI ribbon is waiting in the wings!

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 November 2019

Microsoft have announced a new preview version of Power BI ribbon - this blogs shows what it will look like.

Dynamic comparison calculations in DAX

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 11 November 2019

This blogs shows a clever way in which you can use a slicer to choose which values to compare in a measure.

Explaining the VALUE argument of the RANKX function in DAX

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 29 October 2019

The RANKX function does what the name implies - it ranks values based on a calculation. However, the VALUE argument often causes confusion; this blog explains what it does!