Tag Archive: Business Intelligence

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

  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,…

How to create a toggle button in Power BI

In this blog post I will be showing you how to use a toggle button in Power BI. A toggle button in Power BI allows users to quickly switch between two options. Our first step is to create a toggle button as Power BI doesn’t have one by default. You can import one but by creating it yourself, it gives you more control. Our toggle button is created by having two images of identical size over the top of each other and using bookmarks to flip…

Creating calendar tables with DAX using 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…

Using T-SQL Merge to load Data Warehouse dimensions

In my last blog post I showed the basic concepts of using the T-SQL Merge statement, available in SQL Server 2008 onwards. In this post we’ll take it a step further and show how we can use it for loading data warehouse dimensions, and managing the SCD (slowly changing dimension) process. Before we start, let’s have a quick catch up on what an SCD is… What is a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD)? If you want a full explanation of…

Business Intelligence in the Cloud

The Cloud is pretty much top of the list of the corporate buzzword bingo phrases at the moment. It's clear what the benefits are from a SAAS perspective, but it's been less clear how the Business Intelligence world will start to make use of it.

Data Warehousing, Management Information, Cubes, Data Mining etc. all involve a lot of data, usually gigabytes or terrabytes even for medium sized organisations. Internet connectivity (speed and…

BCS talk on Business Intelligence – Slides

Thank you to the BCS Shropshire branch for opening your doors to the Purple Frog team. We’re delighted to be given any chance to talk about Business Intelligence, and spread the word to increase awareness of what it is and how it all works. We find it a fascinating world to work in, and hope that there were some converts in the audience! For those that asked, here’s a copy of the slides for you to download. As the presentation was…

BCS talk on Business Intelligence

On Monday 20th September, Alex & Hollie from Purple Frog Systems will be giving a talk on business intelligence to the Shropshire branch of the British Computer Society. The event is free to attend, even for non BCS members, and will be held from 6.15pm at the Telford campus of Wolverhampton Uni. We’ll be providing an introduction to BI, explaining what it is, how it works and how it can benefit your organisation. We’ll present…

Data Warehousing: Kimball vs Inmon

Anyone involved in the Business Intelligence space has had their head in the sand if they are not aware of the long running, and more often than not misunderstood, debate between the two conceptual models of data warehouse design. Bill Inmon has recently posted an article on www.b-eye-network.com discussing the matter, and to his credit, has tried to put forward a number of balanced pros and cons of each methodology. I’ll state now that…

Leap before you can land

Leap before you can land… Research scientists at the Southern Illinois University have concluded that primitive frogs learned to jump before they learned to land. The result being a rather inelegant crash landing. I’m sure the frogs were happy that they achieved their goal of getting from A to B, but I do feel sorry for them having to endure the presumably painful landing, not to mention the indignity of having the rest of the pond witness…