A week ago, I wrote that Power BI sharing improved by giving you the ability to include specific reports and dashboards in an app. Recall that that there are three ways to share Power BI content: workspaces, apps, and dashboard sharing. Only the last two lets you share content out of a workspace, such as by sharing with free users if the workspace is in…
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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on January 29th at 6:30 PM. Julie Smith will hack sweet reports in Power BI. Innovative Architects will sponsor the meeting. And your humble correspondent will show you two new cool Power BI features: integration with PowerApps and Q&A in Power BI Desktop. For more details, visit our group page. Presentation:…
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One Power BI aspect that I'm not crazy about is sharing. It's my experience that most organization could benefit from a simplified sharing where users or groups are added to a workspace with different roles and permissions, such as Content Manager, Browser, Administrator. This could have worked conceptually like SSRS security. At some point, we could have nested workspaces and custom roles, such as a…
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Natural queries (aka Q&A) has been a prominent feature since Power BI Service existed. Wouldn't be nice to do the same in the Power BI Desktop? You can, but make sure to enable first Q&A from File, Options and Settings, Options ("Preview features") tab because it's currently a preview feature. Once you do this and restart Power BI Desktop, you should see "Ask A Question"…
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UPDATE: Microsoft has added support for multi-valued parameters in the DAX Query Designer. Please read the discussion thread below for more info. You can use the approach discussed in this article if you need more control over the parameter handling, but the Microsoft-provided way should suffice for most cases and it's easier to implement. Déjà vu today with a twist. SSRS multivalue parameters in SSAS…
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One of the Power BI most prominent strengths is that it's a part of the much broader Microsoft Data Platform that spans various on-premises and cloud offerings for data storage, processing, and analysis. After the integration with Visio, Power BI just took another leap forward with the introduction of the PowerApps custom visual. Use this visual to bridge the Data Analytics and Developer worlds. Now…
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I'm excited to announce the third edition of my Applied Microsoft Power BI book! When the original book was published in January 2016, it was the first Power BI book at that time. Since then, I helped many companies adopt or transition to Power BI, and taught hundreds of students. It's been a great experience to witness the momentum surrounding Power BI. The third revision…
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Bring your data to life today and learn how Power BI changes the way everyone gains insights from data. Publication date: 1/20/2017 Size: 380 pages, 7.5" x 9.25" Price: $49.99 ISBN 10: 0-9766353-7-2 ISBN 13: 978-0-9766353-7-6 There is a newer edition of this book Introduces information workers, data analysts, IT pros, and developers to Microsoft Power BI — a cloud-hosted, business intelligence and analytics…
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Sharing Reports with External Users Happy Holidays! I hope you're enjoying this special time of the year – time for sharing and giving. Speaking of sharing, how does your company share BI artifacts with your B2B or B2C partners? Do you still send Excel spreadsheets or embed canned SSRS reports? If so, Power BI offers a better sharing model and I'll show you how in…
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I'm a big fan of self-documented semantic models. Business users have a hard time getting their way around complex models and descriptions can go a long explaining the purpose of metadata. After waiting for years for Excel to support field descriptions (the wait is still on), the December update of Power BI Desktop now supports them. The new Field Properties window lets you enter descriptions…
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