I had an interesting request from a client recently, they wanted to work out how frequently their customers ordered products. Putting this into "database speak" they wanted to calculate the number of days between customers' transactions. Clearly, in order to do this calculation, I needed to find the transaction date that was before the transaction date sitting in the current row. It occurred to me, that such a calculation could have a more general application; not necessarily just calculating days… Read More
THE BURNINGSUIT BLOG
By Alison Box
Power BI in Practice Training 10th October 2019
Top 10 Power BI Desktop Annoyances
You know that moment when you're using Power BI Desktop and you start swearing under your breath? I have to admit I don't often do this but when I do, boy do some things annoy me! So just to get things off my chest and have a good old rant, I've listed my top 10 annoyances in Power BI Desktop and notice I haven't even mentioned the ridiculously small default font used by visuals.Read More→ Read More
By Stuart Box
Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources Training 3rd October 2019
Our Autumn Training Schedule
We have released the schedule of our Power BI and DAX training for the last part of this year. Our courses cater for all levels of Power BI users, from the Fundamentals course which offers a good introduction to creating and sharing Reports and Dashboards with Power BI, our Advanced Power BI course which takes things to the next level with a closer look at the Data Model and advanced topics such as Row Level Security, and our DAX course… Read More
By Stuart Box
DAX Learning Power BI in Practice Training 16th September 2019
Level Up! Take your Power BI Skills to the next level with Advanced Training
This week we're delighted to announce the availability of our new advanced Power BI courses. We offer a full range of courses to take users from their first look a Power BI to advanced topics such as Apps, Row-Level-Security and CALCULATE and FILTER in DAX. Read this post to find out about these new courses and see which one is right for you.Read More→ Read More
By Alison Box
Learning Microsoft Power BI in Practice 31st July 2019
It’s Complicated – Dealing with Many to Many Relationships in Power BI
If you're building a DataModel in Power BI, and creating relationships between tables you may have come upon this message. What the heck does "Cardinality Many-Many" mean? And what is the "Significantly different behaviour" they're warning me about here? In this post I set out to find out what these Many-to-Many relationships mean and how they work. The answer is complicated, but worth understanding if you want to create efficient data models in Power BI. Two Types of Many-to-Many Relationship… Read More
By Stuart Box
Microsoft Power BI in Practice 29th July 2019
The Filter Pane Pain in Power BI
The July 2019 update to Power BI is now out, you can get all the details from Microsoft here. As usual there are a list of new features and tools released in the product. One of the main updates is the release of the new Filter Pane. Existing reports can upgrade to the new pane through the Options dialog, but any new reports should automatically have the new pane on by default. The Filter Pane is a new way of… Read More
By Stuart Box
Microsoft Power BI in Practice 12th July 2019
Joke’s Over – send Email to users when refresh fails
I do a lot of Power BI Training, and have been doing it since Power BI came out over three years ago. So to keep myself fresh, amuse myself and hopefully my delegates, I've built several "Jokes" into my Power BI training. But now with the latest update to the Power BI service one of my favourite gags has been stopped. The joke used to go like this. The Tale I'm an Office 365 users, that means my Email, Diary,… Read More
By Alison Box
Learning Power BI in Practice 22nd June 2019
Understanding the “Analytics” Lines in Power BI
In our Power BI training courses, I show people how to add a Constant Line to a clustered column chart and I then, rather glibly, dimiss the other lines by explaining that "they are calculations across the totals". But what actually do I mean by this; what are these calculations? I do feel that these Analytics Lines deserve a much better explanation so now is the time to turn the spotlight on them. Firstly I'm going to take a closer… Read More
By Burningsuit
Microsoft 17th June 2019
Burningsuit Featured at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit
This week, the Burningsuit team were delighted to attend the Microsoft Business Applications Summit which took place in Atlanta, Georgia. The summit featured many insightful talks, training sessions and updates about the Power BI platform. Keep an eye out for our next blog post that will be an in-depth look at the two day event and everything that we experienced and learnt. For now, discover why this summit is so important for our industry and our main highlight from the… Read More
By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 9th May 2019Best and Worst: Two approaches to finding Top or Bottom N Percent using DAX
Ever wanted to find which are your best or worst customers or best or worst products? Finding a simple TopN (or BottomN) in Power BI Desktop couldn't be easier; use "Ask a Question" on the Home tab; just type "Top 10 Customers by Total Sales as a Column Chart" or "Top 20 Products by Quantity as a Table" and see the magic happen! But what about finding Top 10 Percent? As the number of customers or products grows over time,… Read More