What the fact.bi - All about Power BI, DAX, M, Power Query

This post is also available in: Deutsch

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

This post is also available in: Deutsch 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 GB of RAM, which were reserved exclusively for me. As a result, I reached the limits of my rented server quite fast. For example, when all my datasets together exceeded 25 GB of RAM or my calculations exceeded the capacity of 8 CPU cores. Gen2’s concept is more like a software as a service approach. Now all capacities run on regional clusters, where all […]

Use measure or virtual table as filter for CALCULATE

This post is also available in: Deutsch Last week, a colleague at work had an interesting question with a client. They wanted to perform a calculation with CALCULATE, but only wanted to include rows 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 another calculation on the filtered table. Measure always requires filter context A characteristic of a measure is, that they always require a filter context. To make a simple example, my Measure has the formula Sales Amount = SUM( myTable, [Sales Amount]). This formula requires a filter context to execute against. Do I want to calculate the sales numbers per product or better the sales numbers by year? Or maybe by country or by customer? All these scenarios can be solved with the same formula that I just mentioned. But the difference on the result depends on the filter context. Best product by category For this scenario, I would like to use a simplified example. We assume I have different fruits and they are divided into color categories: Color Product Green Kiwi Green Avocado Orange Orange Orange Mandarin Orange […]

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

This post is also available in: Deutsch 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 these areas can definitely be helped. Be it with a conscious choice of colors and high-contrast combinations. But also screen readers can help affected persons by reading the particular content to them. Physical limitations In addition to visual impairment, physical limitation is also common. These can be fine motor disorders or have a disease-related cause and simply mean that people have problems guiding a […]

Display websites within Power BI dynamically

This post is also available in: Deutsch 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 Desktop does 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 HTML5 Viewer visual is very useful, with which we can display HTML code in a visual. In HTML itself there is then the iFrame tag, which allows to embed another website into your own website – or in our case into our Power BI Visual. This combination allows us to embed a website directly into a Power BI report.But the website author can prevent the website from being included via iFrame. For example, YouTube and Google prevent embedding via iFrame. In this case, simply no content […]

New notation for Date or DateTime format in Power BI

This post is also available in: Deutsch 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: If you want to have a calculation with date and time, then you have to add the TIME function: And here the notation with DATE and TIME actually becomes a bit tiresome. Notation as text A new option is to write a date or date and time as a simple string in the following format: Or time included: Thus, it is possible to describe the above two examples in the following way: Or time included: From my point of view a very useful feature, because it saves a little bit of typing. However, I would be even happier to have an improved handling of the time calculations. […]