Recently, Power BI charts introduced trend lines. However, they require numeric or date values on X-axis, which must have a continuous type. In fact, if you use a text field for the X-axis, a warning indicator will be displayed in the top left corner of the chart to warn you that non-numeric values are used. This requirement presents issues if the report is connected to…
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Power BI is one-year old. it's hard to imagine that one year has passed but here we are. The momentum behind Power BI is huge both from development and customer perspectives. It's exiting to see a product that evolves so fast based on feedback from users. So, there will be many more birthdays. And for the nay sayers out there, no, Power BI is not…
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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on July 25th at 6:30 PM. Shabnam Watson will teach you MDX fundamentals. Pyramid Analytics, our sponsor, will show us why they are Microsoft Power BI preferred vendor. And I'll demo the Power BI Publisher for Excel. Rate this meeting http://aka.ms/PUGSurvey, PUG ID: 104 Presentation: A SQL Developer’s Guide to MDX Basics…
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Have you looked at your BI spend recently? Sometimes, I'm puzzled by the enormous spending in "this is how we've always done it" initiatives that probably could be replaced and done much more efficiently with modern technology and cloud computing. I had a recent conversation with a Chief Analytical Officer of one of the US largest financial organizations. They have outsourced hosting of their 5…
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I'm presenting in person "What's New for BI in SQL Server 2016" for the SQL User Group in Birmingham, AL tomorrow, July 19th starting at 6 PM local time. Steel City SQL July 2016 Meeting Language: English Event Type: In-Person Online Meeting URL: None RSVP URL: https://steelcitysqljul2016.eventbrite.com Join us Tuesday the 19th in Room 311 of Russell Hall on the Samford University campus for the July meeting of Steel…
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Sometimes, you might run into a scenario that requires an aggregate over an aggregate. Consider the following report: The AvgOrderAmount has a simple calculation: SUM(Sales)/SUM(Qty). This calculation is applied uniformly. The Total line would divide 300/7 and will return 42.86. However, what is the user wants the result in the DesiredAvgOrderAmt column which produces a simple average over the details (50+40)/2. This could be accomplished by…
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One great feature of Microsoft BI has been the continuum from personal BI to organizational BI. For example, a business user can start small with an Excel Power Pivot model which IT can restore at some point to a scalable Tabular model. In fact, if you know Microsoft personal BI (Power Pivot or Power BI Desktop), you already know 80% (or even more) of SSAS…
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A large publicly-traded organization is currently standardizing on Power BI as a single BI platform as a replacement of Qlik and Tableau. They analysts have prepared a gap analysis of Power BI missing features. On the list was QlikSense variables. The idea is simple. The user is presented with a slicer that shows a list of measures. When the user selects a measure, all visualizations…
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