PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
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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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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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Feeling the heat, Tableau has come up with an updated Power BI vs. Tableau battle card as one of my clients pointed out. This time designed as a video. I guess the previous "10 Ways Power BI Falls Short" slide deck, which I discussed in the part 1 and part 2 of my "Power BI vs. Tableau" blog , wasn't effective enough. I concur given…
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A Power BI presentation is rarely complete if someone doesn't ask me to demonstrate the Cortana integration. However, unlike everything else in Power BI that gains features in time, in my opinion the Cortana experience has lost some value. Previously, you could ask natural questions in Cortana across datasets, just like you can use the Power BI Service Q&A to gain insights from dashboards. Unfortunately,…
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Scenario: You have published a Power BI Desktop file with a report to Power BI Service. You want to give certain users access to some pages in the report. This is not a security mechanism although it could be, if you want to control security at the report layer. Solution: When a customer asked about this scenario, my first thought was to create reports directly…
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