Persisting temporary accessible data via Power BI Datamarts with the example of Power BI Activity Logs

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Last week I had an interesting discussion with my friend and co-organizer of the Power BI User Group Switzerland, Kristian Bubalo. The question was whether it is possible to persist temporarily available data using only Power BI on-board tools and surprisingly, we discovered an extremely viable solution. As a more specific example, we had the discussion about data that is called via REST API and is only available for a certain period of time. For this article, I will use the data of the Power BI Activity Log as an example, which only provides the rolling values of the last 30 days for download.

Materialization of data requires query folding for incremental refresh

To materialize such data within

Power BI Premium Gen2 is here – everything you need to know about it

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It was already announced since the end of 2020 that there would be an update in Power BI Premium capacities. After being in preview for some time, “Generation 2” or “Gen2” short, as the new version is called, is now generally available.

But what is the difference to the current Power BI Premium and what is going to change?

What exactly is Power BI Premium Gen2?

Gen2 is a re-architecture of the existing Power BI Premium capacity. This redesign results in a few changes that are important for the end user and the administrator of the Premium Capacity.

The previous Power BI Premium capacity was the same as renting a physical server. For example, when I rented a P1 capacity, I would get 8 CPU cores and 25

Use a measure or virtual table as filter for CALCULATE

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Last week, a colleague at work had an interesting question with a customer. This wanted to perform a calculation with CALCULATE, but only on the records of the table where a measure has a certain value. Or in more simple terms, he wants to filter the table by a measure and then perform the calculation on the filtered table.

Measure always requires filter context

A characteristic of measures is that they always require a filter context. To make a simple example, if my measure has the formula Sales Amount = SUM( myTableem[Sales Amount] ), then this formula needs a filter context. Do I want the sales numbers per product or by year? Or maybe by country or by customer? All these issues can be solved with

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