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Showing posts from October, 2020

Calculated Measures on a Halloween Full Moon

According to The Old Farmers Almanac , a "full moon on Halloween only occurs roughly once every 19 years. If the full moons are calculated using Greenwich Mean Time, that translates to approximately three to four times per century." And on the day I am writing this post, October 31 st of the year 2020, there is a full moon.   Spooky, huh?   Frightening? Maybe. But not as scary as having too many calculated measures in your Power BI reports! <Ba dum tss> Okay, so maybe the full moon and candy are getting to me.   If you have made calculated measures for your reports, you know that they can quickly become quite numerous.   Also, if you are not aware yet a measure only gets run when brought into a visual and a measure is dynamic.   This means that a measure does not need to be housed/located on a specific table in order to function.   So the question becomes where should I put my measures.   There are a few ways to organize these.   1)    No organization plan at al

October's POWER BI's Updates

So… what’s new with Power BI this month? If you'd like to read about the updates to the program then below is a brief summary of the features I enjoyed the most 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 October Power BI Updates    We 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.   Updated Report View If you are brand new to Power BI, this is the best update I have seen.   Now you have a nice welcoming watermark when you open the program.   The watermarks lead you to what your first step should probably be if you have never opened the program.   It also gives you the option of loading a sample dataset right from the start.   Personalize Visuals With this month’s update personalizing visuals on the service is no longer a preview feature, but generally available.  

DEMO: How to Set Up Parameters for POWER BI Reports

Parameters are a fancy term to me for a variable that you can change the value of any time you wish.  Parameters on a report allow you to change what data you are actually loading and looking at.  If you set up a parameter on a date column you can filter what dates from your data source actually get loaded.  If you decide to set a parameter on a geographical column like state or city, you get to decide what geographical data actually gets loaded. If you set a parameter on a data source you get to decide what source you are pulling your data from.   You might be thinking, can’t I just do all of that in the Power Query editor using filters on a column.   You are correct in your thinking, but I need you to think beyond the desktop application and think about what happens when you publish out to the service.   I need you to think about what your end-user needs to decipher what data they are going to look at. If I have tickled your interest, in what parameters can do then take a loo

Building an App Session 7 | Editing Records- Demo

  We have made it to our 7 th session of building this check-in app.  If you are interested in all of the ins and outs of what got us to this point and you want to build the app from the beginning check out the six videos in the playlist first. In our last session, we learned how to add records by using a form.  In this session , we are now going to find a way to edit any records that are in our student location data source.  To do this we will need to add some navigation functions, icons, and also force the hand of Power Apps to take our form out of the default New Form mode and change the form to edit mode.  We are also going to run into a problem where our pre-populated fields of the form don’t behave the way we wish they would.  We will fix this using an IF statement. The goal of these next few blogs and videos is to build an app, but not do it too quickly.   I want to let the information soak in one week at a time without overwhelming anyone.   If you think the videos cover t

Avoiding Unwanted Outcomes using Date Columns

Many people have dates as part of their data sets.  Dates are great to allow us to view our data aggregations in smaller buckets in order to get extra details about our situation.  Sometimes though we are faced with having multiple date columns in one table. The more date columns the better, right?   Well, this can usually lead to two outcomes.  1) Frustration that you can’t view the data based on your 2nd date column 2) Not realizing the data you are looking at is in fact NOT accurate.  I will show you in the video both of these unwanted scenarios.  More importantly, however, I will show you how you can use some fairly simple DAX and modeling relationship techniques to resolve the issue.   Let me set up the scenario in this video for you.  I’ve made a very basic Excel file that tracks sales by what state they occurred in, when the sale occurred, and when the sale shipped out.  So if I want my team to see the number of actual sales that have occurred I would use the sale date column.