Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the defining features of Power BI’s [paginated] Report Builder vs the current geospatial offerings in Power BI Desktop is the native support for ESRI Shapefiles. If you have worked with maps in Report Builder over the years, you may have used the Map Gallery. The Map Gallery offers a collection of built-in geographies,…
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.…