The date dimension table, a basic ingredient in any BI dataset, enables us to enrich a date with many attributes such as day of week, workday/weekend/holiday, financial year, and the list goes on, depending on your needs (Here’s an previous article on its importance). This is why, in 99% of my Power BI datasets, there is a date dimension connected to the fact tables. Whenever I need to filter by date or present a filter/slicer to my users, I use the date field in the date dimension, instead of a date field in a fact table. I’m sure this practice isn’t new to anyone who’s been building BI systems. However, there’s one annoying Power BI behaviour which I’ve been wrestling…

The Power BI Desktop September version is loaded with many features I find useful. They aren’t perfect but a very important step in the right direction to becoming a mature BI product which is not only easy to use and cheap, but also full of important features. Here are the main additions in my opinion: Drillthrough to another report page. It’s a basic feature in other products, which has finally arrived to Power BI. It allows you to define a page as one that other pages can drill through to it, passing a filter. A good example is a customer page, where you show details of a specific customer. Then, from a sales page, you can click on a transaction…

Your Power BI reports and dashboards likely rely on an underlying data source being up to date and following some business rules. For instance, It may be a data warehouse schema which gets updated once a day at 3:00 am, collecting data from all 314 branches of your bank. Your users want to be sure that the information they see is correct and up to date, so you want to be able to respond to any data issue as quickly as possible. You want to be sure that all information from all 314 branches has been received and processed at 3:00, and if there’s an issue, you need to know about it ASAP. There are many monitoring systems that can…

Power BI Desktop gets updated once a month, and every month I keep my fingers crossed, hoping for items on my wishlist to be added, mainly the ability to save filters which I cannot understand how it can be missing from one of the market leaders product. Seems like I’ll need to keep my fingers crossed for another month, but it’s not a disappointing release at all. The biggest news as far as I’m concerned are the “what-if” parameters. It’s a simple way to let the user play with parameters and see how his selections change existing data. So, for example we can let our customers see how a sales report would look like if prices go up by X…

When working with Power BI desktop, you can define whatever date format you want to use for each date field in your model. That works well on Power BI desktop, and on the Power BI service (the browser). However, there’s one annoying case where your format is ignored, and I’m here to help with that, after a recent tough struggle. That case is when you use a date field in a slicer, shown as a slider: The date format used in this case has nothing to do with what you may have defined as the format of the field. It will show as dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy and that’s usually OK, but which one will it be? dd/mm or mm/dd ?…

A few months ago I wrote a few tips for Power BI users. Here are 5 more! Use the “Edit interactions” option Your visuals interact with each other. If you have a table and a pie chart on your page, clicking on a piece of the pie acts as a filter on the table. This is the default behaviour, but you can control which visuals interact with each other, and disable filtering if you want to.This is very useful when you want to display a mixture of static and dynamic data on the same page. For instance, you want a chart to show performance based on a date slicer, but you also want to display a few “Last 30 Days”…