The Algebra Teacher Powers to B.I.

 One of the most powerful features of Power BI when it comes to DAX is a time series analysis.  Using pre-defined DAX functions can allow you to report on values based on specific time periods.  You can do things like referencing the previous year’s value, have a running year-to-date total, find closing balances for the month, and much much more.   For this blog, I want to explain how to get a rolling total for a specific time period.   Rather than just simply writing the expression, I am going to break it down step by step of how it is built out and why it works.   By understanding the reasoning behind the formulas, you can leverage this knowledge to apply time series analysis into your own Power BI reports.   For our rolling total, I will find the rolling sales amount for the last 3 months no matter what level of dates I am currently viewing in a visualization.   This calculation can be easily modified to finding a rolling total for the ...

If you have not taken advantage of the new modern visual tooltip preview feature in your Power BI reports yet you want to take advantage now.   Below is why you want to take advantage of this feature.   With the new tooltip, if any of your visuals have a dedicated drill through page attached to it, the tooltip will display this feature.   Before this, your end-user needed to know to right-click a data point to access your drill through page or you had to a separate button to your report page the lit up after a visual selection attached to a drill through was made.   Now, it is way more intuitive to all users that drill-throughs have been created.   Also, with the new tooltip feature if you visual has drill down capabilities they can select to drill down right from the tooltip and not click on the dedicated buttons attached to the visual.   The styling of the tooltip has also been updated which I believe is a cleaner look for end users.   Yo...

 Whether you are new to Power BI or have been using it for a while, filter context for visualizations and measures are so important to understand.  I will admit it took me a while as someone brand new to Power BI and data modeling to wrap my head around it.  With some practice and learning from others, things finally clicked for me.  So for this week’s video, I wanted to showcase to you the basics of filter context.  After understanding how filter context worked, I then realized that sometimes I didn’t want the current filter context or I wanted to modify it to show values that were important to me.  This then led me down the rabbit hole of the CALCULATE function in DAX.   Wow!  I did not even know how powerful the CALCULATE function is in terms of modifying filter context.   Check out this week’s video for an explanation of filter context and then how you can modify it using the CALCULATE function.   I also showcase three other...