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”…

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…