More than Excel BI
A few months ago I participated in Q&A in the Sydney Power BI User Group, and one person asked whether we should write our queries in datasets or dataflows. The Q&A format doesn’t allow you to spend too much time on a single question, so in this blog posts I’m providing a more comprehensive comparison of the two options. Continue reading “Power Query in dataflows vs. datasets”
Almost three years ago, my first book, Exam Ref 70-778, was published. Microsoft Exam 70-778 is now phased out, and Microsoft Exam DA-100 replaced it. The new official Power BI exam reference book, Exam Ref DA-100, is now available through Microsoft Press Store, Amazon, and other places! Continue reading “Microsoft Exam Ref DA-100 is now available!”
The sort by column feature of Power BI hides some potentially unwanted complexities. This blog post shows how you can avoid having to sort a column by another column while maintaining a custom sort order. Continue reading “Built-in column sort order in Power BI”
Occasionally in Power BI, you may want to display day or month names as single letters to save space. This may result in duplicates because neither day nor month names are unique when you shorten them to one letter. In this blog post, I’m showing two solutions to the problem: one in DAX and one in Power Query (M language). Continue reading “Single-letter day and month names in Power BI”
Drill through from cards is a common requirement in Power BI reports. While measure drill through has been possible for a while now, drill through from cards has been tricky until recently. In this blog post, I’m showing two ways to configure the card drill through. Continue reading “Card drill through in Power BI”
I’m now officially a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)! Becoming an MVP wasn’t a straight path for me: I became an MVP on the second try. Continue reading “I’m now a Microsoft MVP!”
There are instances where you get a comma-separated list of keys in each row of a table, and you need to replace it with lookup values. This blog post shows two ways of addressing this situation in DAX. But first, why would you want to do it in DAX? Continue reading “Working with comma-separated values (CSV) in DAX”
The August 2020 release of Power BI Desktop includes a new Power Query function: Table.AddFuzzyClusterColumn. This function allows you to clean, cluster, or group text values. In this blog post I’m showing an example of how it works. Continue reading “Grouping text values in Power BI”
On more than one occasion I saw people writing complex functions in M to convert hexadecimal numbers to decimal ones (Greg Deckler and Soheil Bakhshi, to name a few). In this blog post, I’d like to share probably the quickest way of doing it. Continue reading “Converting hexadecimal to decimal numbers in Power Query”
Soon, 49 financial DAX functions are coming to Power BI. All the functions are available in Excel already. See the full list below. Continue reading “New DAX functions (June 2020)”