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Dashboarding and Reporting

  • Creating calendar tables with DAX using Power BI

    April 6th, 2020 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Dashboarding and Reporting, Power BI

    By Nick Edwards In this blog post we’ll take a quick look at creating a self-generating calendar table using DAX. Dates are important if we want to perform time intelligence reporting on our data i.e. yearly sales, monthly sales, weekly sales, year to date sales or previous year sales. We’ll be using the calendar function to create our date table, but there are other methods to do this such as CALENDARAUTO or GENERATESERIES. Here is the…

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  • First thoughts on DataZen

    May 20th, 2015 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Dashboarding and Reporting

    Following the recent announcement of Microsoft acquiring DataZen, I’ve been having a play around to see what it can and can’t do. Here’s a very brief summary so far: The Good: Very quick and easy design interface Fantastic way of modifying dashboard layout for tablets and mobile devices It seems to ‘just work’ very well You don’t have to worry about the pixel perfect layout of what’s where, it takes care…

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  • Excel creates inefficient MDX

    May 5th, 2015 in Analysis Services, Blog, Dashboarding and Reporting

    Whilst investigating a slow set of Excel pivot tables (connected to a multidimensional SSAS cube), I found some odd behaviour in how Excel generates its MDX, sometimes doing far more work than if required and causing significant performance reduction. Take the following example, just querying Customer Count by Promotion, against the AdventureWorks cube. The profile trace (just using “Query Begin”, “Query End” and…

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  • Microsoft Acquires Datazen

    April 16th, 2015 in Analysis Services, Blog, Dashboarding and Reporting

    Exciting news in the Microsoft Analytics space. On 14th April 2015 Microsoft announced they are acquiring Datazen – what does this mean, and is it a good or a bad thing? For all of PowerView’s good points, it’s still a very immature product. I’ve still not had a single customer take it seriously, aside from a few proof of concept implementations. It’s a good ‘personal analytics’ tool, but in my opinion…

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