Blog – Page 22 – Prologika

Two Virtual Workshops to Learn the Power BI Platform

April 5, 2020 / No Comments »

Take advantage of this exclusive opportunity to increase your data IQ from the comfort of your home wherever you are! Register today for my instructor-led digital training events and learn the Microsoft Power Platform consisting of Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. 1-Day Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) Workshop Date: April 14, 2020 Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT -4) Price: $199 For more information and to register, go to https://prologika.com/event/diad20200414/ 1-Day Application in a Day (AIAD) Workshop Date: April 21, 2020 Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT -4) Price: $199 For more information and to register, go to https://prologika.com/event/aaid20200421/ The workshops will be conducted online. Login instructions will be sent to registered attendees before the event.
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on April 6th

April 2, 2020 / No Comments »

MS BI fans, the time has come for a virtual meeting. Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, April 6th, at 6:30 PM. I'll show you how business analysts can apply AutoML in Power BI Premium to create predictive models. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you're planning to attend). Presentation: Bringing Predictive Analytics to the Business User with Power BI AutoML (Virtual Meeting) Date: April 6th, 2020 Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: Join Microsoft Teams Meeting Learn more about Teams | Meeting options Computer audio is recommended Conference bridge number 1 605 475 4300, Access Code: 208547 Overview: With the growing demand for predictive analytics, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) aims to simplify this process and democratize Machine Learning so business users can create their own basic predictive...
How Much Are You Really Saving?

March 30, 2020 / No Comments »

I helped an ISV a while back with their BI model design. They purchased a data transformation tool for $5,200/year because it's "simple to use" (the tool was designed for self-service data transformation tasks by business analysists) and "relatively inexpensive". The idea was to run the tool manually every time they have new data, import data from text files, transform, and output the data in another set of files, and then load the transformed data in Power BI. However, as it typically happens, the data transformation complexity quickly outgrew this approach. What did the ISV learn along the way? Stage the data – Although it's tempting to do transformations on the fly, data typically must be staged so you can query and manipulate it. This is also required to compare the input dataset with the target dataset and take care of things like Type 2 slowly changing dimensions that may...
Tracking COVID

March 28, 2020 / No Comments »

I've seen various reports designed to track COVID-19. I personally like the Microsoft Bing tracker (https://www.bing.com/covid). Not only does the report track the current counts, but it also shows a trend over time. It even goes down to a county level (the trend is not available at that level)! And it's very fast. As good as it is, this is one report I hope I don't have to use for long... Stay healthy! Here is another more advanced dashboard that a data geek will appreciate.
Getting to Power Apps Source Code

March 26, 2020 / No Comments »

As it stands, Power Apps doesn't offer an easy way to get to the app source code. Yet, there are scenarios where this could be useful, including: Putting the app source under source control when the Power Apps version history is not enough. Currently, Power Apps doesn't integrate with source code repos, such as GitHub. Finding references to an item. For example, I've referenced a collection in the wrong property, and I couldn't find what triggered the collection load on the app startup. Since Power Apps doesn't currently include dependency analysis for collections, I wanted to search the source code to find all references to it. Here is the fastest way to get to the app source code: Open the app in edit mode and click Save As. Choose "This computer" and click Download to download the app as a *.msapp file Rename the extension of the downloaded file to...
Getting Lineage Across Power BI Tenant

March 22, 2020 / No Comments »

Power BI Service (powerbi.com) packs a graphical lineage view with the caveat that it only works within a workspace. As a Power BI admin, you may need a utility to inventory all Power BI artifacts published to all workspaces (including My Workspaces) in your Power BI tenant. Fortunately, the Admin - Groups GetGroupsAsAdmin can do the job in one call without any coding! Don't be misled by "groups" in the API name as groups are equivalent to workspaces (the original V1 workspaces were joined by the hip with O365 groups so Microsoft got carried away here, which I'm sure they regret by now given than V2 workspaces decoupled from groups :-). Go to the API page and click the "Try it" button (isn't great that you can test any Power BI API without writing a single line of code?). Sign in with your Power BI credentials when prompted. Enter a...
Power BI Embedded, Service Principals, and AAS

March 14, 2020 / No Comments »

In my previous post "Power BI Embedded, Service Principals, and SSAS", I discussed how you can integrate Power BI Embedded (App Owns Data) configured for service principal authentication with SSAS to pass the effective user identity. One important observation is that you can use this approach with both internal and external users. For internal users, the Power BI gateway (running under an account that has admin rights to the SSAS instance) passes the effective user identity under the EffectiveUserName connection string setting. For internal users, the effective user identity maps to the user UPN, such as john.doe@prologika.com, so that AAS can map it to the corresponding AAS account. For external users, you can configure the gateway for CustomData, and pass whatever you want as an effective user identity. Suppose that one day you migrate your code to Azure Analysis Services (AAS)? AAS. Will it work? Unfortunately, not. Since there is...
NullToZero in Power BI and Tabular

March 5, 2020 / No Comments »

Null and zero typically have different semantics, where null indicates an unknown or missing value while zero is an explicit value. Sometimes, however, you want to show nulls as zeros. For example, an insurance company might want to show 0 claims instead of a blank value. By default, when a DAX filter doesn't find any rows, the formula returns null (BLANK in DAX). For example, this Claims Count measure will return null when no claims match the report filters. Claims Count = DISTINCTCOUNT(FactClaims[UniqueClaimNumber]) How do we show nulls as zeros? The easiest and fastest way is to simply append zero. Claims Count = DISTINCTCOUNT(FactClaims[UniqueClaimNumber]) + 0 Note that the storage engine is optimized to eliminate empty spaces so converting measures to zero can impact performance negatively. In addition, by default, reports remove dimension members with empty measures. This won't happen if measures return zero.
Power BI Report Books

February 15, 2020 / No Comments »

Scenario: Management has requested an easy way to view a subset of strategic reports located in different Power BI workspaces. You can ask the users to mark reports and dashboards as favorites so they can access pertinent content in the Favorites menu, but you're looking for an easier configuration, such as to create a book of reports with a built-in navigation that organizes reports in groups (like a table of contents), such as the screenshot below demonstrates. Workaround: Creating a Power BI app might be your best option. However, a long-standing limitation of apps is that there is 1:1 relationship between an app and a workspace. Therefore, by default all included content must come from the same workspace and you can't create multiple apps in a workspace, such as to distribute content to different audiences. But thanks to the upgraded navigation experience, an app can include links to reports in...
Power BI Report Slide Show

February 13, 2020 / No Comments »

Scenario: You plan to display a Power BI report on a monitor. You want the report to automatically cycle through report pages, showing each after a configurable time delay, like a photo slide show. Solution: There are at least two solutions to accomplish this: The Microsoft-supported way is to install the Power BI Mobile for Windows and use its presentation mode feature, which is shown in the screenshot below. The open-source Chrome "Power BI Real Time Slideshow" extension.