Wise Owl Training - Power BI Desktop blogs (page 1 of 2)

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.

Some suggestions for possible uses for bookmarks in Power BI Desktop

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 24 March 2018

This blog gives some suggestions for how you might use the new bookmarks feature in Power BI Desktop.

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).

Learning bookmarks in Power BI Desktop

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 14 March 2018

You can use bookmarks to take your reports to the next level - they take a while to get used to, as this blog shows, but they're worth the hassle!

5 interesting custom visuals in Power BI Dektop

Posted by Sam Lowrie on 12 March 2018

Basic Power BI Desktop visuals can leave something to be desired. Try these 5 visuals to spice up your reports!

New features in the February 2018 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 February 2018

You can now search for formatting properties, have slicers which work across pages and create quick measures, among other new features.

New features in the January 2018 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 11 January 2018

This month introduces a smorgasbord of small but useful updates, including the ability to hide pages, colour data labels and to set the anchor (from) date for a relative date slicer.

How to use an unpivot transform in Power BI Desktop (or PowerPivot) Query Editor

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 January 2018

If you get data in pivot (two-dimensional) form, you can unpivot it to get the underlying rows, and hence produce charts and visuals. This blog shows how!

New features in the December 2017 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 January 2018

Field descriptions anyone? This is a fairly minor update, although we like responsive horizontal slicers, and there are some exciting things coming up in preview mode.

How to write an M formula to convert Julian dates using Power Query

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 December 2017

This short blog explains how to convert Julian dates to "normal" ones, and how the formula used actually works!

How to reuse a query created in Query Editor or Power Query

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 November 2017

This short blog explains how you can copy and paste the steps of a query that you've created in Power Query (within Power BI Desktop). The steps also work for queries created in Power Query within Excel.

A summary of the new features of Power BI Desktop introduced in November 2017

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 November 2017

There's not too much to whet the appetite here: most of the changes are extensions to existing features, such as conditional formatting and column-by-example.

New features in the October 2017 update of Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 09 October 2017

On the minus side, the changes introduced in this update (mainly a selection pane and spotlight facility) are tiny, but on the plus side there is a huge new feature (bookmarks) waiting in the wings in preview mode.

A summary of the changes for the September 2017 update to Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 12 September 2017

The September 2017 Power BI Desktop update introduces ribbon charts, a feature to explain the increase or decrease for any chart point and a drill-through feature allowing you to temporarily switch to a summary page.

Changes made in August 2017 to Power BI Desktop

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 August 2017

A quiet month, after the frenetic activity of the July update, sees lots of small changes to matrices, tables and charts, but no single big update.

The July 2017 Power BI Desktop updates, including new table and matrix visuals

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 July 2017

This is a bigger update than usual, with the highlight undoubtedly being the official roll-out of the much-trailed new table and matrix visuals.

Adding row-level security to Power BI reports

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 July 2017

To prevent the wrong people seeing the wrong data in your reports, you can create row-level security (for example, so only the London regional manager can see London data). This blog explains how!

What Power BI gives you for free, and when and how to pay for extra services

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 July 2017

You can create and publish reports using Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service, both of which are free, but to share them you'll need to pay either for Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium. This blog explains when you'll need to start spending money, and what your options are.

How to share dashboards and reports in Power BI Service

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 July 2017

There are a fair few ways to let others see your masterworks: you can create an app, share a dashboard or create and share a report URL. This blog explains all of the ways that you can choose to share your Power BI reports and/or dashboards.

Creating app workspaces to share content with others in Power BI

Posted by Andy Brown on 03 July 2017

You can package reports, datasets and dashboards into app workspaces, and share these with other people in your organisation and beyond (these used to be called content packs). This blog explains how to do this, and why you'll need Power BI Pro to do so.