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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…

5 Power BI Tips (2nd edition)

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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”…

Calculated Columns and Measures in Power BI

Ziv Himmelfarb
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With Power BI, as is the case with other BI products, you can load your data and start analysing it. The data can come from almost any possible source: relational databases, excel spreadsheet, online services, text files and what not. Furthermore, the data can come from more than one source, allowing you to use Power BI as an integration tool. I’m pretty vocal against using Power BI, or any other BI platform to integrate data from different sources. I’ve talked about it a little bit here. The gist is that it’s better to integrate your sources into a data warehouse or data marts,and connect Power BI to them. That way they are independent of trends in the BI space, and can serve as…

The Date Dimension in modern BI systems

Ziv Himmelfarb
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One of the most common dimension tables in any data warehouse or data mart is the date dimension. It typically stores, for each date relevant to the organisation, a few fields which describe that date, such as: year, month, month name, work day(yes/no), financial year, quarter, day name, and the list goes on, depending on what you need. When connecting the date dimension with your fact tables, it makes it easy to answer questions like “what’s the most profitable day of the week”, “what are the business results of the 3rd quarter” etc. Here’s a glimpse:   Modern BI visualisation products (namely where I’ve seen this: Tableau and Power BI) often have a built-in functionality that serves as a date dimension.…

Power BI Desktop July 2017 Update

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Ziv Himmelfarb
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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,…
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