Reporting for Everyone – Create accessible Power BI reports in just a few steps

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An overlooked, but even more important topic in IT in general, but also in the area of business intelligence, is to make programs, or in our case reports, accessible to as many people as possible.

What are the different types of barriers?

Although there are other barriers, we will focus primarily on two areas. On the one hand visual, on the other hand physical limitations.

Visual limitations

When it comes to visual limitations, many people first think of blindness. However, there are significantly more types of visual limitation. Probably the most common is the red-green color blindness, which is estimated to affect nearly 10% of all people. There are also other limitations, such as problems with low-contrast content or limited ability to see.

People who have problems in

Display websites within Power BI dynamically

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Recently, I had received several questions about whether you can view a website directly in Power BI. This can be implemented quite easily and is a good way to add more information to a report.

However, one restriction must be mentioned in advance. Unfortunately, Power BI Desktopdoes not load web pages, so we will focus on the Power BI Service here. But as a final result, here’s what we can look forward to:

Loading via iFrame with HTML5 Visual

In order to be able to load a website into our report, we must first ask ourselves which visual this can be done with. Here the

New notation for Date or DateTime format in Power BI

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Quick update on the Power BI August 2021 release and this more, in case you encounter this new spelling and wonder what it is.
As the title suggests, there is a new way to create a Date or DateTime value.

If we consider the CALENDAR function as an example, then two values in the format Date must be specified as parameters. Up to now this was possible with the DATE function. For example, a calendar for the year 2021 would be created in DAX like this:

DateTable =
CALENDAR(
    DATE( 2021, 01, 01 ),
    DATE( 2021, 12, 31 )
)

If you want

Change formatting of each individual value dynamically with Calculation Groups

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In September last year I had already written an article on how to dynamically adjust the values of a measure, for example in millions, thousands or without scaling:

Dynamic scaling of a measure in Power BI with DAX

The approach at that time with the FORMAT function had a big disadvantage, the value is always converted to a text with FORMAT. This means that the measure can only be used in tables, because bar and line graphics cannot display texts.

With old approach representation only possible in tables

In the meantime, however, there is a much better way to display a measure with dynamic formatting using Calculation Groups. With Calculation Groups I can also create the formatting dynamically

My Power BI and Power Query code snippets are moving to GitHub

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Pretty much since I started the blog, I’ve been gradually sharing my code snippets for DAX and M here on the website. As the list got longer and longer and more and more confusing with all the examples, I decided to maintain and publish the code snippets on GitHub from now on.

There I can provide and maintain them much more organized. As usual, I’ll add new examples to the list as I come across something that might be useful for you.

The snippets are available on::

https://github.com/selimovd/PowerBISnippets/…

Add a single value parameter for any column

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Last week I had investigated why a what-if parameter sometimes skips values and how to bypass this. In a discussion with my valued friend Bernat Agulló, we came across the topic of single values in slicers and he directed me to a tweet on how to do this with Tabular Editor.

Single values as slicer with tabular editor

In order to do this, the experimental features must first be activated in Tabular Editor. This can be done under File > Preferences:

Enable experimental features in Tabular Editor

After that, the desired

Why is it sometimes not possible to select the exact number in the what-if parameter and how can this be solved?

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I like working pretty much with the what-if parameter in Power BI. With the help of this, it is possible to run through corresponding scenarios in a very fine-grained manner. What would my operating result look like if I can increase my sales by a factor of 2? How would it look with 1.5? And how about 2.35? I am aware that these increases are extremes. But with the what-if parameter, such evaluations go very easily with a single slider.

Problem the what-if parameter does not work, the exact number cannot be set

However, there is occasionally the case that exact values cannot be set. Let’s take the case just mentioned as an example. I would like to evaluate the development of my sales, accurate to

Replace data sources in Power Query with published Power BI dataset

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Occasionally, as a Power BI developer, you are faced with the task of replacing the data source in existing reports with a published Power BI dataset. Especially if there are already several reports that were created with a copy of a PBIX file and are now to be consolidated to the same dataset.

The question here is how best to proceed in order to achieve the goal as efficiently as possible.

Delete the old data

I had tried many approaches in the past, but the simplest one is by far the most efficient. I would like to demonstrate this using the example of my vaccination statistics, where I access the dataset of the German report for the English version.

How can I export the underlying data in Power BI?

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In Power BI, I repeatedly encounter the situation that it does not work to export the underlying data. The option is simply not available. In general, this can have several reasons. In the following article we will take a look at the possible reasons for this.

1. Disabling in Power BI report

The author of a report can limit the export for the specific report. For this purpose, it is possible to select in the options in Power BI Desktop whether users are allowed to export summarized data, the underlying data or no data at all:

Selection whether summarized or underlying data may be exported

2. At least build permission

COVID-19 latest vaccination statistics now available for whole Switzerland on impfstand.ch

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A few weeks ago, I visualised the current status of vaccinations in the canton of Basel-Stadt with Power BI in a weekend project. I have received a lot of positive feedback in response to this. Many thanks at this point for that. In addition, there were numerous requests to extend the report to cover the whole of Switzerland.

It took a few days, but the report now contains data for the entire country. The Power BI Report can still be accessed at:

https://impfstand.ch

The selection of the canton can easily be done using the navigation:

New features that are now