Month: November 2019

Team file sharing and version control may be managed through Power BI workspace integration with OneDrive and SharePoint team sites. In this post, I will show you how to get started and setup a new project.

This is a series of posts and exercises from a recent full-day workshop called Next Level Power BI. Check back for additional lessons and freely post your questions and feedback in the comments section after this post.

Power Query is a modern data acquisition and transformation technology and it is the “Get Data” component of Power BI and many other Microsoft tools. The query script language of Power Query is known as “M” or the Microsoft Data Mashup language. The menu options and selections in the Power Query Editor interface build this “M” script for you but to use Power Query at an expert level, you must understand fundamental concepts of the language. The post will step you through some essential mechanics of the language to build the necessary fundamental skills.

Enabling the modern data analyst by becoming shopkeepers rather than gatekeepers of information

I really appreciated the opportunity to sit down and talk with one of my heros in the industry. Donald Farmer has been recognized leader in the Business Intelligence and Analytics industry for the past two decades and his thought leadership is even more relevant today. He played a key role in shaping the Microsoft BI toolset as a Principal Program Manager from 2001 when the products we use today were in their infancy.

Power BI table and matrix visuals can render SVG object elements in a column or measure to display in-line web content. You can build dynamic content like KPI indicators, databars and sparklines by altering SVG element content using DAX expressions. In this post, I will show you how to create databars that show negative and positive values with different color fills based on category values. Of course, Power BI has built-in databars in the conditional formatting options for numeric columns but you cannot alter the color and other attributes dynamically – at least not yet. For the time being, this technique provides more flexibility than the built-in databar feature.

In this first post in a series called “Next Level Power BI”, I demonstrate how to create dynamic databars using a Scalable Vector Graphic. A dynamic SVG databar, icon, sparkline or practically any imaginable graphic can be produced with calculated column or measure.