September's PowerBI Update

September's PowerBI Update | 2020

It’s that time again for another update from Power BI. If you like to read about the updates then below I give a brief summary of the features I really enjoy from this month. If you want the full experience and would like to see the new features demoed for you then check out the video Devin and I made for this month right here à September Power BI Updates Devin and I hope this helps you along your Power BI journey.

This month has quite a few updates and here are the ones I enjoy the most.

Smart Narrative Visual

This new visual added to the desktop will analyze all the visuals on a report page and come up with insights. These insights will be displayed as text in your visual. I think of this visual being like a Sticky Note on steroids. You can choose what text you want to keep, modify the text, and even add your own measures to this visual. This is a preview feature so you have to turn this on under the File menu, options , and settings, preview features.

Q&A Supports Math

Yay! You know I was a math teacher before I switched over to the BI world. So I was ecstatic when I learned I could now ask my Q&A visual to do not just simple math operations, but even advanced operations. I can ask Q&A to add two countries' profits on the fly and if I want to take it further I can even multiply that result by another number. Think of you have a goal you want to reach for the next year and you want your sales to increase by 10%. So this formula would need to honor the Order of Operations of 1.10(US Sales + Canada Sales)

Workspace Search

Hallelujah! I am part of so many workspaces at my job and when I am ready to publish my reports I hate scrolling through all the workspaces to find the one I need. Well, we now have the search capability for publishing to a workspace in the desktop. Yeah, this is a minor update but sometimes it is the simple things in life that makes me happy.

If you want to see all of the updates check out our video here à September Power BI Updates

Comments

Best Practice To Trim Before Removing Duplicates or Merging In Power Query Editor

In last week’s blog, I wrote and did a video about how to remove duplicate records and keep the most recent entry as long as a date column was part of the data source. I came across the scenario while giving training on Power BI with my company Pragmatic Works. See the video below: This week, while doing another two-day training I came across a different scenario from a follow-up conversation from day 1. I had explained how to remove duplicate records and one of the students started working on a Power BI project she has for her company. On day 2 the student informed me that her remove duplicates step was not working. I said that is odd and I asked to see the data. In one of her table visuals, I could see that it appeared that a few of the records had duplicates based on the name column. After further investigation though, we figured out the culprit. She had done all the steps correctly, but it was a data integrity issue. In her data source, the perso

The Power of CALCULATE in Power BI

Last week in my blog and video I discussed how Power BI could have made my life as a teacher much easier. It is not that Power BI can do things that I could not on my own. It is the fact that Power BI could have saved me so much time. This led me to some thoughts and questions. How could I have impacted the students more in the classroom with this extra time? Would teachers who were not analyzing student data due to time constraints now start? How can I make the data tell my students a story that gives them an accurate picture of their progress? That last question is what leads to this week’s blog. Many times the metrics (which is just a fancy word for "numbers") of what we want to show are easy to do by hand with a basic math background. Although easy, it can be very time consuming when dealing with different groups of data: like 6 periods of students instead of 1 period. When we want to do these calculations quickly with minimal effort in Power BI it is not

Relating "Related Tables" to Baseball because I Miss Sports

I miss sports. In particular, I miss baseball. Between learning more Power BI functions and the ins-and-outs of DAX, I've turned to Netflix to fill the deep caverns left in my soul since baseball season has been postponed. And as a result, I've thought more about tigers and big cats more than I ever have in my life. I know ALL about Carol Baskins and am fully on board for a spin-off centering on locating her lost husband. I've googled "is it really legal to own a tiger in a residential area?" Without baseball in April, I am barely hanging in there (kinda like Joe Exotic's eyebrow ring). So, I am filling the sports-sized hole by using baseball stats in Power BI to demonstrate pulling data from multiple tables and consolidating it into one table. Some of the data we want to consolidate also has to have some aggregations (which is fancy for "calculations") performed on it. In this demo I will attempt to break down what is really going on

The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

Search This Blog