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 us a solution he brought to a question in the Power BI Community Forum. I that thread (and answering the particular use case) a few solutions involved doing it all in Power Query, while Paul brought in a DAX approach to the solution. Beyond the particular use case of the question, this raises the question: how can we show individual measures in a tabular format? Continue Reading..
Hello there, quite a while ago I wrote a blog post explaining how to override calculation items in tooltip. Basically, if I’m using calc item A and B in a chart, how can I use A B C and D in the tooltip. My solution was to add 2 extra calculation groups with lower precedence, one to remove filters from the calculation group on the main visual, an the other one (copy of the original calculation group) to recreate the desired calculations. This solution does work, but is quite tedious to maintain if you have changes in the original calc group, and (I’m not sure if it’s related) when combined with the time intel dynamic label calc group, it took A LOT to display the tooltip. I tested again a few days ago and even with my new laptop (i7 32GB of ram) it took like 10s, most of them going to «other» things, not the dax query, so little can be done.
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 from a pristine data warehouse, you should actively check these things, like after each refresh. It’s one of these things that you should do, but normally does not make it anywhere close to the top unless results look way off. If there was an easy way to check that…
First of all I have to credit Dan Meissner for bringing up the use case in the SML forum. The idea is to add the measure description in the tooltip, somehow. He thought that calc groups might be part of the solution, as they are «aware» of the measures in the filter context and tagged me as he knows my little obsession with calc groups. And indeed Calc groups can be the answer, but not in the way that I first imagined.
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 chart. The key here is the plural thing. Otherwise just use the famous script to create a dynamic measure calc group from Johnny Winter and off you go. But here the need is to select the measures from a simple slicer. I want to se measure A, B and D but not C.
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, for example. Since they are «one-click» means you can just store it as Macro/Quick Action and even put it in a custom toolbar if you are using Tabular Editor 3 (which you should!). I’ll just start with two, but I plan adding more over time.
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 is when you load from a relational database that has a static date column (such as creation date of the record). You create your RangeStart and RangeEnd datetime parameters and off you go. And if you only read from your beautiful DWH, lucky you, no need to read further.
In the real world (at least the one that I know) people want to retrieve data from SAP, like a lot. I don’t really understand this SAP thing, but basically they keep scrolling adding columns with weird icons next to it until it’s all in. However, if they try to retrieve too much info, the query fails. So what is to be done?
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 compare things, we need to graph a number, however, as humans, we might like to see 4h 30min instead of 270 min. Searching around in google you will find several approaches for transforming a number of minutes or seconds into higher units of time. And that’s a great starting point. For example here’s a great post by Reza Rad. Here we’ll just imagine we have minutes and we want hours and minutes.
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 Editor scripts. If you do, don’t start with a blank sheet. Always copy from someone and build from there (that’s what I did!) — there are lots of great scripts out there. Maybe not tons, but certainly lots.
But anyway, once you get going with Tabular Editor C# scripts (now we need to specify if we are talking c# or DAX scripts) you may feel that you are repeating code, and as in any kind of programming, that’s not just a waste of time, it’s bad practice. So, today I’ll share how I’m starting to move my scripting to the next level, creating a custom DLL for Tabular Editor C# Scripts (never did that before!) and making use of intellisense by moving development (or at least the bulk of code typing) to Visual studio.
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 formatting when calc groups are involved is a bit more challenging, but as usual with calc groups, once you grasp how they work you can do almost anything you want with it.