Blog

Power BI

21 de mayo de 2022

Creating Filtered Measures, or how to show the total along with the detail in a chart.

It's a terrible title, but by the end I hope it makes sense Today I had some spare time and I thought I would do some c# that is always good to keep your mind going. The goal was to create a script that given a base measure, you can then specify a column and[...]

Power BI

3 de mayo de 2022

Creating a dynamic KPI card

I'm always keep an eye open for potential new members of the Barcelona Power BI User Group. When I see a potential candidate I try to connect and get to know him/her. Today I was surprised that one of these unsuspected new members told me he was already using my script for Time Intelligence (yay!)[....

Power BI

9 de abril de 2022

Completely arbitrary tables in Power BI

Hello there, this is not an entirely new technique, but then again, maybe the use case will be useful to someone, so I'll go ahead and put it here. Indeed the idea came once again from the whatsapp group of Power BI User Group Barcelona, great people all around. Paul shared with the rest of[...]

Power BI

16 de marzo de 2022

Easy Management of Referential Integrity

Referential what? it sounds weird, but it's a rather basic thing: It's like asking, do you have all the product IDs of the sales table in your product table? If you don't, then is when that infamous "blank" appears in slicers and all kind of bad things start to happen. Unless you load everything fro...

Power BI

24 de febrero de 2022

Multiple Measure Selector in a Chart

Hello, hello. After another round of presentations that dried my spare time to blog, just today a new use case came to me through a question in the whatsapp group of the Power BI User Group Barcelona. The goal was to be able to select the measures that should be displayed simultaneously on the same[...

Power BI

12 de febrero de 2022

One-click Calculation Groups for your toolbelt

Hello there, today I don't have any new fancy use case for calculation groups or anything else, but rather a repository of links to the best of the best c# scripts... to create calculation groups. The main use of this post is to point people this way when I do a presentation on calculation groups,[....

Power BI

15 de enero de 2022

Incrementally load from SAP, APIs or almost anything

Ok, so today there are no calculation groups in place, but I want to explain a technique to use incremental refresh even when your source does not support query folding as we normally understand it. Let me explain myself: In general the only use case that is widely documented for incremental refresh...

Power BI

12 de enero de 2022

Charting time as Hours and Minutes

Once again I'll recreate here a use case I found at work because I think it's cool and with some gotcha's that can be fixed. The use case itself is broad enough. We are measuring the duration of an event (working hours, machine runs, etc) and we want to visualize it. Since we want to[...]

Power BI

6 de enero de 2022

Bringing Tabular Editor c# scripts to the next level

Is no secret that if you work daily with Power BI, you should be using Tabular Editor, but if you are working with lots of different datasets you probably feel like you are doing the same thing over and over again. Then it's time to bit the bullet and get your hands dirty with Tabular[...]

Power BI

25 de diciembre de 2021

Calculation Groups and Conditional Formatting: Yes it's possible.

I've been meaning to write this post for quite a few weeks if not months, and looks like today I may start finally to do it. The detonator has been that I had to do it at work, and Yuki asked about it on twitter. Too much of a coincidence to let it go. Conditional[...]

Power BI

11 de diciembre de 2021

Calculating the percentage of targets reached

After a long break due to a truckload of presentations (for my standards) here I'm back again with the blog. I have a pile of ideas, but always the latest idea takes priority as it is hot, it's burning in my head. A guy from the Barcelona Power BI User Group asked me if calc[...]

Power BI

30 de octubre de 2021

A dynamic color gradient for values and totals

It's a loooong title (well, it was "Conditional Formatting with divergent color gradient for values and totals"), but it's exactly what I wanted to achieve when I discovered the limitations of the conditional formatting options in the GUI of Power BI Desktop. The key words are "dynamic" in one hand ...

Power BI

24 de octubre de 2021

Building arbitrary tables with 2-level column headers

If you have worked with Matrix visual you probably have faced the problem: Your end user would like to group all the measures that are thrown in into neat little groups, putting all de Quantity- related measures in one group, all the value measures in another, for example. What I've seen so far is t...

Power BI

14 de octubre de 2021

Identifying who exported that leaked CSV

Today's topic is more like an academic exercise than a production use case, but there are a lot of learnings along the way and I think it's worth the effort. The other day I saw a tweet by Igor Cotruta that talked about "text fingerprinting". The idea is embedding the user id in invisible characters...

Power BI

2 de octubre de 2021

The ultimate hack to set column widths in a matrix

Ok, I have maybe gone a bit overboard with the title, but I think it has some advantages over other hacks out there to establish the column widths of matrix, so here I am to explain how I came up with it and how to use it. The first hack I saw was from Ben[...]

Power BI

1 de octubre de 2021

Mysteries of filtering by Measure Value and a Calc Group Workaround

Ok, it's a long title, but it's the best I came up with. So here's the story. At work there was a sales report with a nice matrix. On the rows, we had several product attributes like category, subcategory and so on. On the columns it was a bit weird because they wanted to show[...]

Power BI

3 de septiembre de 2021

Changing display units without a suffix

This may seem trivial, but it did not pop up in my head at first, so might be useful to somebody else. In sales reports, there are lots of numbers. And if it's a large company these numbers may be very large. So depending on the visual, the full number may be a bit too[...]

Power BI

12 de agosto de 2021

Data mapping done right

Hi there. In my previous post on how to set up a "data problems" button I did mention that there was a further improvement to the approach, so here I am to explain what is this about. As you may recall, in my previous installment on the topic, the user is warned that there is[...]

Power BI

25 de julio de 2021

Setting up a "Data Problems" warning (and detail page) in Power BI reports

I've seen it many times. While there is a set of "official" attributes for a product, or a client or whatever, a department may choose to group them through one or more custom attributes. And what do they do? Of course, they create an excel file where they manually maintain a table with the key[...]

Power BI

10 de julio de 2021

Time Intelligence Dynamic Legend in Line Charts

As I continue my journey with calculation groups I realize that fewer and fewer people may be interested in what I write, but then I think, "so what?" So here I am. My script to create a Time Intelligence Calculation Group based on Daxpatterns.com definitions got a lot of attention (for my standards...

Power BI

9 de junio de 2021

Filtering the impossible with calculation groups

Sometimes we face models which can't be built because we fall into the circular relationship (which Power BI protects us against) or ambiguity (which sits there silently making all our results meaningless). I faced one of this situations the other day at work and found a workaround with --you guesse...