Month: March 2018

Business Analytics, Power BI, Power Query, SSAS Design

How to add KPI indicators to a Table in Power BI

Paul Turley

Yesterday a friend asked for a little help getting started with Power BI.  He’s a DBA and system administrator and wanted to cut his teeth on Power BI with a really simple dashboard-style scorecard report.  Using a list of database servers with license expiration dates, he thought it would be a simple matter to calculate and show the expiration status for each server using a simple traffic light indicator.  The envisioned server list might look something like this:

Makes perfect sense, right?  This is a basic use case and a good application for simple KPIs; with the one minor caveat that POWER BI DOESN’T SUPPORT THIS!

This topic has become a bit of a soapbox topic for me

Microsoft BI Platform

Tour of the Power BI Solution Advisor

Paul Turley

As a follow-up to my earlier post titled “Nine Realms of Power BI and the Power BI Solution Advisor“,  I’ve…

Microsoft BI Platform

Using Power Query “M” To Encode Text As Numbers

Paul Turley

I worked through a brain-teaser on a consulting project today that I thought I’d share in case it was useful for someone else in the community. We needed to convert application user names into an encoded format that would preserve case sensitive comparison. Here’s the story… A client of mine is using Power BI Desktop to munge data from several different source systems to create analytic reports.
Two-Phase BI Projects
I’m going to step out of the frame just a moment to make a soapbox speech: I’m a believer in two-phase Business Intelligence project design. What that means in a few words is that we rapidly work through a quick design, building a functional pilot or proof-of-concept to produce some reports that demonstrate the capability of the solution.

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