Reading Time: 4 minutes Microsoft’s Power BI [Paginated] Report Builder is the newly rebranded version of the venerable SQL Server Report Builder. These static reports have been around for years, but there’s still some room for innovation. For example, Power BI allows designers to import custom visuals into Desktop reports to enrich them beyond the default visual options. What…
Reading Time: 4 minutes This past Tuesday, April 9, I was fortunate to present two sessions at the Power Platform World Tour in Chicago. The first session was Practical Tips for a Successful Power BI Deployment geared toward the new/business user audience. The second was Exploring Maps in Power BI. Slides from both sessions are available (requires free registration for the…
Reading Time: 1 minute The Funnel Bar (FUBAR) Chart for Power BI is a new concept that combines the versatility and inherent trustworthiness of the bar chart with the unpredictability of Power BI’s funnel visual. Why do people use funnels? It is well-established tradition that sales reports include visuals where an axis (usually the Y axis) has bars that…
Reading Time: 2 minutes One of the Power BI improvements in the March 2019 Desktop release was reduced bubble size for the Map visual. I previously wrote about the benefit of the reduction in point/bubble size. I was unaware until recently that this change made it into more than the Map visual. The ability to reduce the point size…
Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the conveniences of Tableau is the ability to easily create “running” totals or other aggregations. These table calculations can be handled through the user interface. One of the questions that I sometimes receive from Tableau users learning Power BI is how to create the equivalent of a Running Sum. As with most things…
Reading Time: 1 minute I was helping a client with an issue recently where their Power BI Desktop Map and Filled Map visuals would not display. My inclination was that something on the network was blocking the connection. This notion was quickly confirmed when my own connection at that location was not displaying the map visuals. It was not a Power…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Displaying customers within a given distance radius on a Power BI map was one of my recent challenges. Report consumers would need to be able to make a location selection and see which other points were in the same vicinity. Here’s a sample report that aligns closely with the requirements: My first inclination was…
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the first things I tried in Power BI Desktop (née Designer) in late 2014 and early 2015 was the Map visual. Power BI’s mapping capabilities were spartan compared to other tools I was using at the time such as Excel, Reporting Services, Tableau, and Leaflet. I wanted Power BI to do everything that…
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the new features that Microsoft announced in February’s Power BI Desktop update is the Improved Python & R Script Editor. The script editor now contains the same features as the DAX editor, including IntelliSense for code completion. After spending some time with the new editor though, I made a discovery about the code completion.…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Exciting news! I’ve been invited to speak at the Power Platform World Tour in Chicago. The two day conference takes place Tuesday, April 9 and Wednesday, April 10 in the heart of downtown Chicago. There are also some pre-cons available if you want to arrive earlier. If you do anything with Power BI, Microsoft Flow, or…
Reading Time: 1 minute Charticulator is the first item that I mention in my recent Power BI Best of 2018 in Data Visualization post. It’s an exciting new tool from Microsoft Research to quickly build advanced visuals. Best of all, you can export charts as Power BI custom visuals without knowing how to code. This morning, I submitted a pull request on…
Reading Time: 5 minutes One of the newer features in the Power BI Admin Portal is the ability to view all of a tenant’s Workspaces. As I was browsing through the collection of workspaces, I noticed several marked as Orphaned. What is an orphaned workspace, and how does it occur? What is an Orphan? An orphaned workspace is one that…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Power BI recently previewed a new filter experience with the addition of an enhanced Filter Pane. Rather than rely on the traditional visual level, page level, and report level experience; the filter pane provides enhanced filter cards that are both easily used and can be styled. As seen below where the filter is set to…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last year, I set a few goals for the DataVeld blog in 2018. How did I do? More consistency – failed Less mapping – succeeded More variety – succeeded In 2018, regarding consistency, I continued the ebb and flow of posting as I was able. I rarely scheduled a post and typically published whenever a post was…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Power BI is not so much a data visualization tool as it is an end-to-end business intelligence platform that ends with visualizing data. Marco Russo approached this well when he explained the differences between a more robust model-based tool and a narrowly scoped report-based tool. While visualizing data in Power BI may sometimes be a bit…
