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Posts by Ziv Himmelfarb

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An Annoying IE and Power BI Issue

Ziv Himmelfarb
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I’ve just spent several hours fighting a piece of software almost as old as I am, in Internet Explorer. (“almost” being 20 years younger than me, which is still pretty old for a browser). When I finally got the issue fixed, I was irate, because I’ve actually had the same battle in the past, but forgot to document it, so here I am, documenting it. I hope it helps my readers, and I’m sure it will help me. Internet Explorer, out of the box on a new machine is extremely annoying, because the default configurations usually do not allow you to do anything. That’s why I usually hurry into downloading Chrome, but sometimes this is not allowed as well (hint:…

Six 2017 Insights

Ziv Himmelfarb
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2017 has been tremendous for me professionally. I’ve been involved in several very interesting projects with four different organizations, across three countries, and even got to work with the government for the first time in my career.  In some of these projects I’ve been the sole “data guy” while in other I’ve been part of, or led a team. Here are some of my insights, not necessarily as relates to BI, but rather about software projects and IT as a whole. 1. Good methodologies do not age very quickly I’ve taken the role of BI solutions architect in a government project, and the project is a classic, almost old-school data-warehouse. There are external sources, nightly processes to acquire the data and…

A Power BI Date Filter Tip

Ziv Himmelfarb
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The Date Dimension The date dimension table, a basic ingredient in any BI dataset, enables us to enrich a date with many attributes. A few examples are: day of week, workday/weekend/holiday, financial year, and the list goes on, depending on your needs. Here’s an previous article on the importance of the date dimension. 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. The Power…

Power BI Continues to Mature: September 2017 Version

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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…

Monitor Power BI Data Using…Power BI

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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 August 2017 Update

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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…

Power BI: Customising The Date Format

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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 ?…

Power BI Vs. Tableau From a Different Angle

Ziv Himmelfarb
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There are quite a few articles and blog posts about Power BI vs. Tableau, and I have no intention of writing another one that will compare features, prices, ease of use, learning curve, and adoption rate. Most comparisons reach the conclusion that while Power BI isn’t as rich yet (They all say “yet” and they are all correct), it’s growing fast, and for a price tag of 10$ a month per user, it’s the winning horse at the moment. I’ve worked with both and I think they are both amazing. Power BI is my current go-to BI product because it’s just way easier to approve a small budget, and that’s what Microsoft is thinking. They give you a 60 days…
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