I’ve had this blog post in my mind to write for the past month or so and I’m finally just getting around to it while I’m waiting to board my flight back home.
These are just five more Power BI tips and tricks that I think everyone should know in order to get the most out of Power BI and produce better, more useful, and more powerful Power BI reports for their users. So without further ado, here are five more Power BI tips in no particular order. Enjoy!
This week I was working on a project for a school up North. This customer wanted to use Power BI and map visualizations to view the locations of the various school buildings in the district. The problem for this very large school district was that they were missing the street address information for some of the buildings and for other buildings they were missing the latitude and longitude.
The good news is that Power Query in Power BI is flexible enough for us to take advantage of the Bing Maps API so that we can lookup the missing pieces of information we need. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can use the Bing Maps API to look up an address based on a latitude and longitude or use a street address to find a latitude and longitude for the location. Continue reading Power BI and the Bing Maps API→
Recently I worked on a neat little POC with Patrick Leblanc for a customer in Education who wished to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on surveys completed by students regarding classes and instructors, which brings me to this blog post.
I’m excited to be able to say that coming up next week on Thursday September 10, I’ll be presenting my session Power Pivot 101: An Introduction to the PASS Excel BI Virtual Chapter! For a lot of users, Power Pivot is like the Ferrari you had in your garage but weren’t aware and that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to be able to present on this topic. This session is completely free and available to all who would like to attend. It doesn’t get much better than that!
Power Pivot is a powerful yet flexible analytics tool built into a familiar environment yet many users remain unsure of how to take advantage of this dynamic tool. In this session, we’ll discuss the purpose of Power Pivot, where Power Pivot fits within your organization and the basics of designing a Power Pivot model that integrates disparate data sources with the goal of gaining previously unrecognized insight into key business metrics.
Power Pivot is an amazing, flexible and powerful business intelligence tool (among other things) and there is no doubt about that fact. As a feature included with Excel 2013 and 2016 (and an add-on for Excel 2010), Power Pivot allows user with a little technical expertise to integrate disparate data source together within a flexible data model. Once the data is loaded into Power Pivot, we easily have the ability to create powerful calculated measures, key performance indicators Continue reading Taking #PowerPivot to the Next Level→
With SSIS 2014 and earlier there is currently not native way to refresh an Excel workbook which include Power Query queries. Now that functionality is rumored to be included with SQL Server 2016 but if you’re currently running SQL Server 2014 or 2012 you are out of luck. But that’s why Pragmatic Works put together the Excel Power Refresh component for SSIS.
Configure the Excel Power Refresh Task in SSIS
Configuring the Excel Power Refresh Task is pretty straightforward. There’s not a lot of complexity to this component, which is a good thing.
If your organization is now a Power BI customer, congratulations. You’re now ready to create some very cool dashboards, integrate disparate and disconnected data sources and take advantage of Power BI’s ability to modify and transform your data, build interactive and dynamic dashboards and then share them with your team and organization. But until you create your dashboards to take advantage of the new visualization types and other improvements, you can easily import any existing Power View sheets in Excel into your Power BI site.
If PowerPivot, Power Query, and Power View had a baby (don’t ask how) that baby would be called Power BI Desktop Designer. Yesterday the Power BI Desktop Designer was released for general availability, which I promptly downloaded last night at 11:30 PM EST and started playing with. Even as my wife turned out the light and begged me to go to sleep, I persisted! I was too excited. So here’s my first run through (I call it run through because it was late and I didn’t spend a ton of time looking at every little thing).
Data and Analytics with Dustin Ryan 