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Same Period Previous Year

Ziv Himmelfarb
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One of my favourite ways to show a value over time is to display it on a column chart alongside the value from the same period a year before.  It allows the users to both see the trend over time and be able to immediately compare to the same period the previous year, without scrolling left and right too much. To do that in Power BI, I’m Assuming you have a Date dimension called ‘Dim Date’, with a date column called ‘date’. Here’s how the ‘Revenue Same Period Previous Year’ measure should be built: Revenue Same Time Previous Year = CALCULATE(SUM(‘Fact Sales'[Revenue]), SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(‘Dim Date'[Date]),All(‘Dim Date’) ) Hopefully that’s simple enough to just copy&paste, and change column names. Let me know…

Renaming a Column in a Power BI Data Source

Ziv Himmelfarb
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Renaming a column in Power BI is easy. All you need to do is double-click on a column name and edit it. If you do that, the only thing that changes, is the name of the column in your Power BI model. It doesn’t change your data source. The change happens in your Power BI model only.  For example, If in the database there’s a column called “NumberOfTickets”, you’re likely to rename it “Number Of Tickets” in Power BI, to make it more readable for your users. But, what if you need to rename a column in the database or file from which you load the data into your Power BI model? Can you safely go ahead and change the…

Power BI Financial Year Reporting

Ziv Himmelfarb
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Power BI’s strong data modelling language, DAX, includes many functions that make it easy for report authors to report on revenue/sales/cost or any other numeric KPI sliced by years, quarters, months, weeks etc., and allowing to compare periods like MTD (Month To Date) or YTD (Year To Date) to the same period last year. This is very handy and very common, as many businesses want to be able to compare their performance between similar periods over time and visualise the trends. At the same time, many organisations do not use the standard years we all do, but rather use financial years or fiscal years, that often start and end on different time frames. Two of the more popular options I’ve…

Power BI: Row-level security while sharing with external users

Ziv Himmelfarb
13 Comments
One of the nice benefits of using a cloud based BI service such as Power BI, is the ability to easily share content with users outside the organisation. This is very different than the old school BI solutions that are installed on-premise, and require access to your network. Another Power BI feature is RLS – Row-Level Security, which allows the publisher to share subsets of the data with different users. For example, allow sales representatives in Canada to see only Canadian sales data. In this article, I’ll talk about using both features together- sharing a subset of the data (using RLS) with users outside the organisation. You would think all you need to do is just use both features, however my…

An Annoying IE and Power BI Issue

Ziv Himmelfarb
1 Comment
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:…

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…
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