Category: Design

Smiling Lady happy that she is using parameters in her Power BI models

Learn how to set up and use Power BI parameters in Power Query and DAX to make your models more maintainable.

Many Power BI reports and dashboards have simple, color-based indicators, commonly referred to as Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. These indicators provide a way to communicate the current condition of a monitored metric. These KPIs require the data consumer to: Trust the data used to calculate it Understand the rule used to derive the indicator […]

Whenever I start a conference presentation, I lead with “Business Intelligence is not just reporting!”  This comes about as a call to get new Power BI users to look more broadly. If all you are doing with Power BI is replicating the Excel spreadsheets you already have, you are missing out on significant value. If […]

I was working with some bookmarks in a Power BI model earlier when I noticed that in some cases the Filter pane was expanded and in other cases, it was collapsed. I was intrigued so I started investigating. It seems when you save the bookmark, it now retains the open/close state of the Filter pane. […]

On occasion, useless solutions like this will be posted as they may not be directly useful in production, but they are educational in value and can lead to useful work. Oh goodness, what have you done? This post originally started as a joke at dinner with Adam Saxton of Guy in a Cube and Jason […]

If you need to do use small-multiple visualization in Power BI, see the easiest way to do it, using the Infographics Designer custom visual!

Part 2 of this series explores the difficulty in determining whether your business intelligence content is using authentic data. To illustrate the point, let’s examine a recent Seattle Times article about the Measles outbreak happening in Washington. An Example The article in question, “Are measles a risk at your kid’s school? Explore vaccination-exemption data with […]

I finished the demo of Microsoft Power BI dashboards and reports that we had built for a client. I looked at the room and asked, “What do you think?” This proof of concept hopefully created excitement, by showing what was possible with the client’s data. As we went around the table, people were generally thrilled. […]

I was introduced to the new Visio custom visual for Power BI during the Microsoft Inspire convention. After a few minutes, I was impressed with the power and simplicity of it. It helped solve a problem that we’ve had when building out Power BI reports. Telling a Complete Digital Story In my Power BI classes, […]

This post addresses one of several common challenges for new Power BI users face. We’ve compiled a list of challenges, based on Our Real World Power BI training series. Making your Power BI slicers visually distinctive. Many new users can create slicers in Power BI to enable the end user to dynamically explore their data. […]