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  • Power BI – Visual to show filters that have been applied to a report

    March 13th, 2023 in Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI

      Most PowerBi reports will use slicers to allow the user to filter and interact with the visuals they have. But in practice, users may forget what slicers have been applied. It’s inconvenient to have to look through each slicer, potentially across multiple pages, to see what filters are being used on the report. Therefore, it is not user friendly. We need to show every filter that has been applied in one convenient place. Thankfully,…

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  • Part 4: Natural Language Processing – Bringing it all together!

    January 23rd, 2023 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI, Python

    Here’s the final post in this blog series on natural language processing where we are going to bring everything together and web scrape Trust Pilot for review data, which we will then perform Natural Language Processing on and then display in a Power Bi dashboard. I’ll be talking exclusively practically in this demo, so for a refresher on the theory please refer back to my earlier blogposts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). To re-iterate the goal…

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  • SQL Server Agent Gantt Chart in Power BI

    December 22nd, 2022 in Blog, Power BI, PowerBI, SQL Server

    In this blog post, I walk-through how to use a Power BI template file I have created that displays a Gantt chart which shows which SQL Server Agent Jobs have run and when. The purpose of the chart is to identify when jobs are overlapping and taking server resource off each other. If two or more resource intensive jobs overlap, it’s a good idea to schedule them at different times if possible. To use the template file, input the server name.…

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  • Previous Row Value DAX

    October 18th, 2022 in Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI

    In this quick blog post I’m going to show you how to use a hidden DAX function to get a previous row value with just a few lines of code. It’s that hidden that intellisense doesn’t even recognise it! I’ll use an example of some fictional race results from some well-known cartoon characters! Lets assume that in this scenario we wanted to analyse the time difference between 1st and 2nd place, 2nd and 3rd place etc in the race scenario…

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  • How to Trigger a Power BI Dataset Refresh via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 Simple Steps.

    June 27th, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Synapse

    In this blog post we’ll explore how to trigger a Power BI Dataset via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 simple steps: Step 1: Create a new security group called “AzureSynapsePowerBIIntegration” in your Azure Active Directory. Next add the name of your Azure Synapse Workspace as a member of your new security group. This will be your service principal. Step 2: Login to powerbi.com and in the top right hand corner locate “Settings” and…

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  • Download Power BI Reports using PowerShell

    April 14th, 2022 in Blog, Power BI, PowerShell, Uncategorized

    In this blog post I will be sharing a PowerShell script that allows multiple Power BI reports to be downloaded at once. In the Power BI service, there is no way of downloading multiple Power BI reports at once. Therefore, users must download files one by one which is slow, time consuming and inefficient. Thankfully, there are ways around this, one of which is using PowerShell. The script is downloadable at the bottom of the page as a txt file.…

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  • Combining Queries from Multiple Sources in Power BI using Merge and Append

    March 1st, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server, Uncategorized

    It is always good practice to do as much data preparation as close to the sources as you can before importing or connecting them to your Power BI reports, but what if there are circumstances where this isn’t possible? I had an issue recently where a third-party application had been updated and both the new and legacy versions were being used side-by-side. Logging data from both versions was being written to two separate Azure SQL databases.…

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  • Making the DAX Engine Work for You

    December 3rd, 2021 in Blog, DAX, Power BI, Uncategorized

    In my last blog post which can be found here, I demonstrated that it’s important to limit your DAX filters to specific columns rather than entire tables, now we know that we can and should do it, let’s explore why and how it works. There are numerous ways to write an expression that will give the same result set, but why are some ways more efficient than others? To answer that we need to know a little about what happens under the hood,…

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  • Replicating SQL windowing functions in Power Query.

    October 1st, 2021 in Blog, Power BI, Power Query

    I’m sure you’ve all heard of windowing functions in SQL Server? But what if you need to replicate these windowing functions in Power Query? Here I have a sample CarSales.csv dataset of car sales per brand, per year, per month and the number of units sold. I will use this dataset to demonstrate how we can replicate the windowing LAG function in Power Query. In my example I’d like to calculate the month on month sales growth per car…

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  • Variables in DAX

    September 10th, 2021 in Analysis Services, Blog, DAX, Power BI

    Variables can simplify your DAX code, help with debugging and help improve performance. To use variables in your DAX measure you need to declare a variable using the VAR keyword, give the variable a name, and then assign an expression to the variable. You can use multiple variables in a measure but when using variables you must use a RETURN statement to specify the final output to be returned. To show how to make use of variables I’ll go…

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