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”…

The July 2017 Power BI Desktop update is a good one. There are two highlights as far as I’m concerned .The first one is the ability to customise field names in visuals, and override the names defined in the dataset. It’s very useful, and in fact I’ve talked about it almost a year ago in my Power BI Wishlist article. The second highlight is relative date filters. We’ve already had relative date slicers, now we have filters as well. This is very important in case you prefer not to waste screen space on slicers, and still want to use the relative filters. Other new features include new quick measures (including a super-cool star rating calculation), GA of the new table…

Power BI apps, announced and released just a few weeks ago, is a very big change to how content is published and shared over Power BI. I had some initial thoughts, but wanted to use it for a few weeks before I share them. 3 weeks later, here’s the deal. From the user perspective: Apps are great In a nutshell, apps replace content packs. Apps are basically a shiny (if it was 2008) way to describe folders of content. Let’s say you have sales reports, marketing reports, and finance reports. Until apps where introduced, a very common way to share was to create content packs per topic, so we would have had a sales content pack, a marketing content pack,…

A few helpful tips I wish I’ve read before I started with Power BI. Refresh before you publish, if you can. For existing reports which you are changing, before you click on the publish button, remember that publishing a report means overriding the underlying dataset. So, first refresh the dataset in Power BI desktop, and then publish. If you don’t do that, your users will see old data. When the publish operation is done, the service immediacy starts a data refresh, but if it’s a big dataset, it could take a while. So just remember to refresh before you publish. But…be careful if it’s a large dataset An exception to the previous, if your Power BI desktop file nears the…