PowerBI.tips

Category: News & Events

Welcome to Community Jam

PowerBI.Tips LOVES community. And we are out to prove it.

We are so proud to announce Community Jam by PowerBI.Tips, the all-inclusive, resource driven, and COMMUNITY led learning tool for members of the Power BI Community. Today is our first step – there is so much more to come.

What is Community Jam

Community Jam is the one-stop shop for what is important in the Power BI community and keeping up with the latest news. As of launch today, there are three main areas of Community Jam: Release Plan, Power BI Ideas, and Bookmarks.

Release Plan

We have incorporated Alex Power’s Power BI Release Plan app into Community Jam, allowing you to see what is on the roadmap for MIcrosoft releases around Power BI.

Power BI Ideas

Mike Carlo has done an incredible job feeding in all of the ideas on ideas.powerbi.com, allow you to easily search, find, and vote for new and hot ideas that should be part of the next wave and future of Power BI features.

Ideas on Community Jam

Bookmarks

This is a cool one. Working with Tommy Puglia, the PowerBI.Tips team has now over 6,000 articles from across the Power BI community of authors and bloggers that you can use as your own knowledge center. Using the bookmarking service Raindrop.io, any new articles, videos, and resources that touch Power BI are saved here.

Bookmarks in Community Jam – Your Go-To Resource Toolbox

I want to talk more about the bookmarking feature here. I have been using Raindrop.io for over 3 years to save any relevant article posted around Power BI. With a combination of RSS feeds, Twitter links, and email subscriptions, a ridiculous amount of articles have been written around the how-to’s, what, and did you know in Power BI.

Tips & Tricks

You can either browse through the latest articles in the Community Jam website or go to the dedicated Raindrop page. On the Embed page, if you have a raindrop account, you can save articles to your own Raindrop service, or simply read the new articles within Community Jam.

Use the “more” button to go to page on Power BI that really opens up the amazing features of Community Jam Bookmarks.

find articles based on nested collections

Nested-Collections

Community Jam Bookmarks have nested collections that allow you to further refine the articles. Simply by choosing on the top of the page, you can fine focused articles (new and old) around Community, Power Query, DAX, Admin, or Data Visualization with just one click.

DAX nested collection

Search

The top right has a search bar that will allows you to choose based on tags (more to come here) or by your own search. Not only will it search title and description, but Raindrop allows you to search the content of the article as well!

Search in Community Jam Bookmarks

Want to learn about variables in DAX? Use nested collections and search, and you got 235 articles to read up on.

Need to read up on Power Query? How about 917 articles?

Admin & Governance? 500+.

What about Tabular Editor 3? 50 focused articles.

How about Charticulator? 28 dedicated resources.

Power BI Goals? We got 56 for you.

The search feature is INCREDIBLE. We have more plans here to include a tagging system (using the # which you can see on the search page) that will further help you find the right resources.

And More Resources

Get your favorite PowerBI.tips resources using the app pane in the top left of Community Jam, including the Theme Editor, Charts, DAX Templates and more. Also, you can find the podcast and all training here too!

Why Community Jam.

We cannot stress this enough. This is just the beginning of what we see as what should be a central area for Power BI fans to learn and grow within the community.

Community Jam is for users, for the community, by the community. Empower and grow, network and learn – Community Jam is ready to go!

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips please follow us on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Or follow us on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

Introducing our PowerBI.tips SWAG store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

Check out the new Merch!

Hasta La Vista Data

Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat

November 3, 2022
Live AMA with Marco Russo & Alberto Ferrari

When the moon hits your eye… If Dean Martin were still alive and loved Power BI as much as we do… Do you think he might change up the lyrics of his song? He would likely add a location like Chicago, add a pair of Italians that rarely grace small audiences together. And mix in an evening with in person and online attendees alike. Unlucky for us, we’ll never hear that song. Fortunately for us, we have two of the foremost experts in modeling and DAX, a location in Chicago, and over an hour to host an in person AMA!

Mix together the good times we like to have. A live audience, a live broadcast, and some serious brain power answering all your DAX and Modeling questions. That sounds like a sweet melody that can carry a night through. We are thrilled that we can host Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari from sqlbi. Join the whole crew of the Explicit Measures podcast Tommy, Mike and Seth as we host this live AMA. We look forward to the conversation that will be mostly driven by YOU the community.

We’ll be hosting this special event in Chicago at the Chicago Power BI User Group on November 10th from 6pm to 8pm CST at the Microsoft Office downtown.

Whether you can join on in person or live online, we hope to see all of you there!

Would you like to join us in person? Be sure to register via the Meetup Announcement.

Joining live online? Stay tuned for our early video posting we’ll have on our PowerBI.Tips Youtube channel.

We look forward to seeing you all there!

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

As always, you’ll find the coolest PowerBI.tips SWAG in our store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

October 12, 2022
Milwaukee Brew City PUG – Sept 2020

We were excited to welcome a good friend of PowerBI.Tips Alex Powers to speak with us at this months PUG meeting. Alex blew a bunch of minds by diving into the depths of Calculated Columns and the love or hate relationship we should have with them.

Calculated Columns are a common element to the new users. Those users typically come from a default analyst mindset of “see the data” then perform the calculation. This pattern can lead to a bunch of performance issues. Alex shows us how to be intentional with our decision making and provides some solid advice throughout. Be sure to check out this video as it is packed with great insights and conversation around this topic for the beginner as well as the long time expert.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips please follow us on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Or follow us on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

Introducing our PowerBI.tips SWAG store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

Check out the new Merch!

Hasta La Vista Data

Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat

Like and Follow

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

As always, you’ll find the coolest PowerBI.tips SWAG in our store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

September 30, 2020
Milwaukee Brew City PUG – August 2020

Back again with another Power BI User group for Milwaukee. This month Mike and Seth walk through the beta release of external tools. If you didn’t see the announcement from Microsoft but in July of 2020 was the release of External tools.

What are External Tools? I’m glad you asked. An External Tool is an application that can be used along side with Power BI. Parameters can be passed from Power BI desktop into the External Tool, such as a connection string to the data model.

We are super thrilled about this new ability to enhance the Power BI desktop experience so much that we built a custom installer that will enable users install many of these external tools all in one place. This is why we build Business Ops.

Watch this month’s PUG to see how to install External Tools for your machine.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips please follow us on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Or follow us on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

Introducing our PowerBI.tips SWAG store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

Check out the new Merch!

Hasta La Vista Data

Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat

August 31, 2020
Milwaukee Brew City PUG – Jan 2020

Here we are, jumping in to 2020. This Month PowerBI.Tips is kicking off and sponsoring the next year of Power BI user groups (PUGs) for Milwaukee. If you are not participating in your Local Power BI User Group we highly recommend that you get plugged in. Power BI User groups are intended for like minded Power BI individuals to get together and learn from each other.

If you don’t have a User Group you can follow along with our group. We record each user group and post the highlights from the 2 hour event. This month we go over the top three most popular blog posts from 2019. Then we demo creating a Paginated report in from a PowerBI.com dataset. Finally we publish the Paginated report into the PowerBI.com service for end users.

Grab Your Popcorn and Watch

Highlights from the Milwaukee Brew City PUG:

Become a Member of the Milwaukee Brew City PUG here.

Get Connect to your User Group

To find a Power BI User follow this link.

Find a 2020 Power Platform World Tour Event near you.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips please follow us on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel. Or follow us on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

Introducing our PowerBI.tips SWAG store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products:

Check out the new Merch!

Hasta La Vista Data

Go Ahead Make My Data

PBIX Hat

February 4, 2020
2019 Microsoft Business Application Summit Retrospective

This year the Microsoft Business Application Summit (MBAS) was held in Atlanta Georgia. Despite some travel snafu’s (3 rebooking’s and 9 delays), we made it into Atlanta late the night before the preconference sessions. Which was good, because we were presenting one!

(A special thanks to Adam Saxton (Guy in a Cube) who went way out of his way to pick up a bunch of materials we needed for the preconference. If you don’t follow Adam and his awesome Power BI channel, be sure to check it out -> YouTube Link Guy in a Cube)

Our “Data visualization with Power BI” preconference session was packed with 180 people and we had a fantastic time showing people how to build no-code custom visuals with the new “Charts” http://charts.powerbi.tips/ (Gallery here: http://gallery.powerbi.tips/) tool based on the Microsoft Research team that developed Charticulator, how to create themes and layouts and many other tips and tricks. The good news for all our followers on powerbi.tips is that we have that content created now and we will be sharing that over time in the form of blogs and other training materials posted to the site.

We each individually had the opportunity to spend some quality Q&A time in the Community Lounge with some great one on one time with many of the conference goers. And we finished off the whirlwind tour with the final session time of the conference where we presented the “Microsoft Power BI: Data visualization best practices”. Here is our session from the conference.

Here is a detailed video of the creation of the custom ribbon chart at the end of the session:

Link to Session BRK 3023 on YouTube

All the sessions of MBAS can be found in the Power BI Community Video Gallery

Top Takeaways:

The best part of any conference is the people you meet. The social aspect and meeting new people are one of the most important aspects of any conference event. We hope all the attendees at MBAS made some great new connections, we know we did!

It is an exciting time to be in the business of data, and the MBAS conference has merged in Dynamics with the Power Platform tools. The keynote by James Phillips brings to light Microsoft’s next steps in the evolution of how these tools are transforming businesses, and the future is bright indeed. Be sure to check out his Keynote

Power BI is still on a rocket ship of greatness. The roadmap is exciting, the community is growing bigger and better every day, and more and more businesses are leveraging the tool to change the way their users interact with data on a daily basis.

Our Favorites:

Of course, our favorites all revolve around the tool we love, Power BI! An absolute must watch video is the road map session that outlines the near term features that are going to amaze you

Link to road map session

We’re huge fans of Power BI dataflows, so of course we recommend those sessions. Here is a Great Overview and explanation dataflows.

Want more information on dataflows, check out these sessions from the conference.

June 20, 2019
Microsoft Business Application Summit – PowerBI.Tips 2018 Top Tips and Tricks
Want to give a special thanks to the Microsoft PowerBI team for allowing PowerBI.Tips to participate in the 2018 Microsoft Business Application Summit. If you were not able to make it to this event don’t worry, we are bringing the PowerBI.Tips session to you.

The 2018 Top Tips and Tricks from PowerBI.Tips Session:

What is in this Video:

Link to Video is here

In this video session Seth Bauer and Myself walk through a number of most viewed / used features of PowerBI.Tips.

The following topics are covered within this session.
If you want to watch all the content from the Business Applications Summit you can zoom over to the official page here.

Be sure to follow:

If you like the content generated from PowerBI.Tips please follow me on all the social outlets. Stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials. Subscribe to me on YouTube. Or, follow me on the social channels, Twitter and LinkedIn, where I will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.
July 28, 2018
Power BI World Tour 2017 – Chicago – Intro to DAX

DAX (Database Access Expressions) can be quite complex. It is essential to being able to appropriately manipulate the Power BI data model for the visuals. The following information was discussed at the Power BI World Tour 2017 and if you’d like to review the content or learn more about DAX hit some of the links below. For all who were able to attend, you were a great audience and super fun! I hope you learn some fun facts and tricks.

Thanks,

Mike

https://powerbi.tips/2016/10/fixing-measure-madness/

https://powerbi.tips/2017/05/using-variables-within-dax/

This tutorial uses the DAX function to create a date table:

https://powerbi.tips/2017/07/use-multiple-connections-between-tables/

https://powerbi.tips/2016/08/make-calendars-using-dax-curbal/

There are some many tutorials on % Change hit this link to read through the tutorials.

October 12, 2017
Power BI World Tour 2017 – Chicago – Top Tips

To everyone who was able to attend the Power BI World Tour 2017, Thank you! It has been a pleasure presenting my favorite tips and trips. This post consolidates all the links for each topic that was discussed. All the links to the content are below, if you want to go through the tutorials at your own pace hit a link below. When going through 7 topics in an hour, it is difficult to completely learn everything. So, if your like me, you learn by doing, making mistakes and gritting it out until you understand. Enjoy and have fun.

Mike Carlo

https://powerbi.tips/2016/06/loading-data-from-folder/

https://powerbi.tips/2017/03/using-parameters-to-enable-sharing/

https://powerbi.tips/2016/07/measures-month-to-month-percent-change/

Note: Percent change seems like a major topic, if you want to see more tutorials on percent change you can follow this link for more tutorials.

https://powerbi.tips/2016/04/power-bi-histogram-with-bins/

https://powerbi.tips/2016/09/hexbin-plot-using-r/

https://powerbi.tips/tools/report-theme-generator-v3/

https://powerbi.tips/2017/08/best-practices-for-sharing/

If you like this content and found it valuable make sure you share it with others. Odds are they will like it as well.

Want to meet more people who love Power BI, get connected with the Power BI User Groups (PUG). Click this link to find your nearest PUG group.

October 11, 2017
Power BI September 2017 Release

September is here and there is a new update for Power BI desktop! I’m so excited for this month’s update as there are many solid features. One of the more anticipated features, Drillthrough. This allows a user to right click on items in a table and drill to more detailed pages within the report with applied filters specific to the user’s need. This feature was initially announced at the 2017 Data Insight’s summit.

Another feature that is definitely worth checking out is the ability to now create more detailed themes for a report. More of the properties of a visual are now being exposed in the JSON format for themes. For people who do a lot of customizing of visuals this is a huge time saver. PowerBI.Tips has provided a tool to assist you with generating your own report themes. Click the image below to go to the improved Report Theme Generator.

For the full details about the September 2017 release check out the blog post from Microsoft.

September 8, 2017