The Business Ops tool is designed to simplify your Development Experience with Power BI Desktop. There are a lot of challenges remembering where all the best power bi external tools are stored. Many MVPs contribute amazing projects to make your development experience better. The installer is intended to streamline and increase your efficiency when working in Power BI. Download this installer and you can add all the best External Tools directly into Power BI Desktop. Our release includes all the best External tools for Power BI Desktop. This will enable you to have a one stop shop for all the latest versions of External Tools.
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 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:
This past weekend, I was a man on a mission. There were two pressing reasons for a new release of Business Ops:
The authors of many popular External Tools released updates recently, so we needed to ship a new version of Business Ops with those updates included
Last week, Michael Kovalsky (ElegantBI.com) released a brand new External Tool called Report Analyzer (which we can already tell will be an instant classic), so we wanted to get it out there and into the hands of report developers ASAP
So, I toiled away most of the day on Sunday, cramming as much value as I could into the next version. And along the way, I learned some important new software development skills, including how to:
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 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:
Where does the Power BI Mobile app fit within your report building plan? This topic is widely un-discussed within the Power BI community. Many blogs and tutorials focus mainly on developing Power BI reports for a desktop screen. More specifically, a report design that fits a wide screen monitor. However, building reports for the mobile app require additional considerations.
The Current State of Mobile
First before we get to the recommendations for mobile reporting developments, let us discuss the current status of building a mobile report. To create a mobile centric view Power BI desktop follow these steps:
Click on the View ribbon
Click on the button labeled Mobile layout
Click on the Mobile Layout
Portrait Mode Only
This takes you to a new screen where the mobile device is positioned in portrait mode. At the time of writing this article there are no options to build a mobile view in landscape. If you desire to have a mobile report that can be viewed in landscape mode you actually have to create a normal report view but with a narrower screen.
View of building reports in the mobile view.
Simplified Build Experience
The report canvas is greatly simplified. Meaning you don’t get all the advanced features of a normal report page. Stacking visuals on top of each other is not an option. Changing the color of the background is not an option on this screen. Instead, to change the mobile page background color you have to leave the mobile view. Return to desktop mode change the color and then return to the mobile view.
An Alternative Approach
Due to the limitations mentioned above. We propose that you build a report page with custom dimensions. From my experimentation a width of a page from 600 to 800 pixels meets my needs. The page length can be as long as you need it so that all the required visuals can fit on the page. Previously pages have grown to 1000 to 2000 pixels in length.
How to customize the page size?
Follow these instructions to change the page size
Click somewhere on the Report page to deselect any visuals
Open up the Visualizations Pane
Click on the Format button; the one that looks like a paint roller
Open the section named Page Size
Change the drop down menu for Type to be Custom
Type in a new Width and Height for the page
Change View of Report for scrolling
By making the page narrower but longer, the default view of the report will cause UX challenges. To fix this the report is will need to render as a scrollable object. To do this we adjust the view settings of the page
Click on the View ribbon
Click on the button named Page View
A drop down menu will appear
From this dropdown menu Click on the option named Fit to width
Fit Page to Width
Other UI / UX Considerations
As a report designer it is important to consider the UI for report consumers. In most reports I design everything that the user can see fits on a single page. Scrolling on a page is not a major issue. As we introduce scrolling on mobile we run into issues with some visuals.
Table Visuals Cause Issues
Take for example a table visual. This visual it’s self has scrolling built in. Thus, if you are scrolling a page on mobile when you touch inside the table and swipe up the mobile experience swipes the table visual. This UX can lead users to get suck inside a table when attempting to scroll the page.
Table Scrolling Solution
A solution to address users getting stuck inside a table is to provide a pixel boarder. The boarder can be either dual boarders on the left and right or just one boarder on the left or right. Inside this boarder do not place any visuals that would require scrolling, such as a table.
Adding a Scrim for added Clarity
In addition to just retaining a pixel gap on the sides I recommend also adding some color to the background. The concept of the color either in blocks or via a gradient color. See the following sample scrim for reference.
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:
A few months ago, I was writing and running various PowerShell scripts to manipulate the connected data models in my Power BI Desktop files. During model development, I was constantly having to open DAX Studio to copy the Server:Port connection string, and thinking, “there’s got to be a faster way to do this.”
So, I developed and released a simple External Tool for Power BI Desktop, which copies the Server:Port connection string for the currently-connected data model directly to the clipboard.
I’m a strong believer in modular design, so when I build something, I try to make it do one thing, and do it well. I believe this External Tool for Power BI Desktop is a great example of that philosophy in action.
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:
Daniel Marsh-Patrick is a custom visual developer who recently released the HTML Content, a custom visual. This month we go over this visual in detail with it’s creator himself.
While this visual is currently at V1, Daniel shows us a preview of V2 and trust me you will absolutely love it. I’m so looking forward to using this visual in my daily workflow. As well as V2 is going to be amazing.
If you like Daniel’s work please consider sponsoring him. This way we can continue to get amazing visuals: https://github.com/sponsors/dm-p
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:
Power BI is a powerful reporting tool that has been dominating the market and rapidly evolving. Yet, in many organizations people seem unaware of its true potential or core purpose. As a result, too often it is deployed to simply extract or visualize data points in an ad hoc reporting manner.
Power BI is greater than a report
Power BI should not be thought of as a separate product to ETL, AI/ML or overall data strategy. Rather, organizations need to include it as part of a data culture with all of the products working in union.
To deploy Power BI successfully, do not use it to simply design reports. Instead, design a culture and architecture. This is one that allows business users to understand, interpret and react to rich and powerful data driven insights.
The many additional products, services and capabilities that come packaged in Power BI are too frequently overlooked. As a result, people see only the top level – visuals in reports and dashboards. But there is a whole host of rich and exciting features below the surface.
With that, here are some common mistakes I have frequently seen new users make when rolling out Power BI.
Mistakes made to under utilize Power BI
Using it for Data extraction Large tables with a selection of filters that you may or may not look to export. Instead, Power BI is designed for trends, insights and cross slice and dice. Large tables and data dumps do not give insight.
Using it for a data visualization to tell a single point Design a visual that can convey information quickly, rather than an infographic type solution. If you are looking for that pixel perfect data visualization for a news story that tells a specific point, there may be other options. Paginated reports or predesigned Excel documents are viable options. Design data pipelines that are regularly updated. Create visuals that are designed to be interactive. This will help users drill down and find insights.
Ad hoc only reporting While this can be a great tool for ad hoc reports, you may be underutilizing and doing extra work. Instead, build reusable data models that are designed for multiple reports. Write DAX business logic and KPI that can serve as a single source of truth. Be sure to document your measures inside the data models. By clearly documenting measures data consumers will understand how to use the data model to build new reports.
Current reporting tool / Excel replacement A common request is to “lift and shift” all excel reporting into Power BI. These products are different and have different uses. If you are moving to Power BI, don’t try and recreate old solutions. Instead, a better approach is to design new reports that play to Power BI’s strengths. Utilize the rich features and powerful engines that make Power BI beneficial. This is a story of it’s better together. Using just Power BI or just Excel has it’s advantages and dis-advantages. Conversely, using both Power BI and Excel can play to each tool’s strength.
Not building a data culture Matthew Roche has an amazing blog series on building a data culture with why and how to do this. Building a good data culture is vital for adoption within the organization. The data culture will start with an Executive sponsor who can push for adoption. So, first and foremost, be sure to have a leader who believes in your vision.
Mistakes made when deploying Power BI solutions
Focusing on raw numbers, not business insights Instead of simply displaying numbers, great reports often have the following KPI, trends, drill down, interactivity and slicing capabilities. This allows business users to gain meaning information about the direction for the business.
Ignoring the deployment approaches Many business users are familiar with a typical process for reports; a user submits a ticket to IT. IT writes a bunch of SQL queries to get the data for this request. They then surface the data in tables and simple graphs. In contrast, Power BI does a great job at breaking down this long turnaround and getting the data in users hands quick. An organization should deploy a top-down, blended or bottom-up approach. As a result of utilizing this approach, they can merge the business and IT side of operations and remove silos.
Failing to Think like the Business and Act Like I.T. The I.T. organization has many strengths related to how to make data available quick and reliably. Power BI is mainly designed for business users. Thus, Power BI has features that borrow from best practices from I.T. One such best practice is the use of Deployment Pipelines.
Not utilizing Data Models or ignoring self-service reporting Data models, as described in this blog by Matt Allington, contain all the metadata needed for reporting. This includes the business logic and data transformations. However, creating and maintaining these can be time consuming. Instead, it is possible to reuse data models and keep one source of the truth for many reports. The modeling experts can own and maintain the models. Furthermore, business users can connect and build their own Power BI reports utilizing the models. This is done without even needing to write a single line of code.
Treating Power BI as a stand alone product, not part of the greater data or AI solution You should not treat Power BI should as just a visualization tool (read this blog by Gil Raviv). Instead, Power BI is a business insights tool, a way to serve and communicate the information within the organization. In addition ML and predictive analytics are baked into it, as are ETL processes, data storage and security. As a result a unified approach to a data culture should be built. Users from all business areas need to be aware of the strategy.
Using Power BI the right way
Power BI should be unified and part of the entire data stage – not a visualization layer on top of it. A modern data platform typically has 4 steps:
Load and Ingest – extract the data out of the source system and transform it.
Store – Land this data somewhere so we can run analysis on it.
Process (or transform) – Run analytics on your data and draw out KPIs, AI and predictions.
Serve – present this data in an easily way for stakeholders to consume it.
Power BI can be all of these steps. From a single report using power query (Load and Ingest) to import data (Store). Next, you can build a model and DAX measures (Process). Lastly, you can surface the data in visuals on the report pages (Serve).
This can be a more enterprise level solution and scale well too. Firstly, Dataflows are set to extract and transform data from many sources (Load and Ingest). You can back-up and store in a data lake gen 2 storage (Store). Secondly, the data can take advantage of automated ML (AutoML) and cognitive services. Build DAX expression over them, combining a powerful DAX language with the power of AI (Process). Last, you can package these as reports, dashboards, apps or embedded into other applications (Serve).
Alternatively, Power BI doesn’t have to be all these steps. A traditional data platform architecture is described by Microsoft in the picture below. You can utilize other tools such as Data Factory to Load and Ingest data. Next, you can use Databricks to Process/Transform the data. Power BI and Analysis services models will serve the data to the end user. This is a great example of Power BI fitting into a greater data solution. However, you should implement the deployment with the entire solution in mind. Power BI is not as a tool for simply creating visuals. A good deployment is deeply rooted in the culture. Each step must consider the others in the pipeline, not sit in silos.
Microsoft is expanding this ecosystem with Azure Synapse. As they roll it out, they are designing data engineering as a single platform. This combines this entire pipeline and tools into a unified experience. Power BI being a part of this platform.
When we think about user level security, Azure Active Directory (AAD) is the gold standard for access and security for organizations. Synapse leverages this technology to remove friction between different azure components. You can leverage AAD across the multiple services for data factory, Data Lakes, SQL and Spark compute as well as Power BI. The experience of governing data on a user by user basis improves with the Synapse experience.
A Low Code Data Engineering Solution
There are many Azure components you can use to produce a well engineered data pipeline. Azure Synapse brings all these tools under the same portal experience. For example, using Azure Data Factory, then writing data into a data lake. Picking up the data and querying flat files with compute engines such as SQL or Spark. Azure Data Factory also has built in features that can simplify data lake creation and management using mapping dataflows.
More Computing Options
No longer do We have to choose just SQL or Spark, rather We have options. We can use Provisioned SQL which was previously Azure Data Warehouse. Synapse now offers on-demand SQL, and Spark compute engines. This is where we are really seeing the technology move to where we have separated the storage layer from the compute layer. This means Azure Data Lake Gen2 serves as storage, and SQL and Spark serve as compute.
One Place for all information
Whether it is Azure Data Factory, Spark, SQL or Power BI. Synapse has now become the single portal for integrating all these services. This in general simplifies the experience and management of all your data pipelines.
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. 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:
Horary! The Power BI desktop for October finally arrived and it is packed with tons of updates. I’m super excited about this month’s release. We rallied the troops and have a ton of MVPs talking about the latest release of Power BI desktop
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:
In the October 2020 release of Power BI desktop you have the ability to load a dataset from the splash page. For this tutorial we dig in on how Microsoft enables a default dataset. Additionally we show you how to customize the default dataset for your needs.
Quite often I need to prototype a visual, or work on some sample data to design a report. The very first step is always loading some sample data. Now that Power BI desktop comes with a default dataset, we leverage this feature to speed up our development process.
Watch the YouTube Video
Additional Thoughts
In this video I explain that the dataset does not auto load with datatypes enabled. This was due to my default setting within Power BI desktop. If you’d like you can make Power BI Desktop auto detect your datatypes for you.
This setting can be changed by the following steps:
Click on the File button
In the drop down menu, Click on the Options and Settings
In the menu on the right Click the button labeled Options
Under the Global section in the Options menu Select the item labeled Data Load
Change the Type Detection for loading data
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:
This month we are trying something brand new. We are introducing a new series called MVPs react. As you may already know Power BI has monthly desktop releases. If you are as excited about these releases as I am I love talking about all the new features. So, why not get a fun group of MVPs together to discuss everything.
These events are similar to a fire side chat about Power BI among the best experts within the community. We hope you enjoy the conversation, and learn a couple new things as well.
Here is our session for the Power BI desktop release for July 2020.
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:
Ever need two different scales on the Y-Axis of a line chart? If so, then this tutorial is for you. While creating a dual y-axis line chart is pretty common in excel, it is not as easy in power BI. The only standard chart that comes with Power BI Desktop that enables dual y-axis is the Column and line combo chart types.
For this particular visual I needed to show correlation between two time series with different Y-axis scales. The Y-axis on the left of the chart had data elements in the thousands, but the right side needed percentages. The tutorial below illustrates how to accomplish by building a custom visual using the Charts.PowerBI.Tips tool.
Video Tutorial
note: there are a bunch of really good custom visuals that can be downloaded from the Microsoft App Source store. However, this article will not review all third party visuals that are able to produce a dual Y-axis line chart.
Source files
All files used to create this visual are located here on GitHub.
Layout file
The file used in this tutorial was a derivation of the Sunset layout from PowerBI.Tips. If you like this file, you can download it here:
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:
