Power BI in Practice | Burningsuit

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

DAX Power BI in Practice 9th May 2019

Best 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

By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources 9th April 2019

7 Secrets of the Matrix Visual

Some of you Excel users may have realised that the Power BI Matrix visual is just an Excel Pivot Table by another term. You even get buckets for “Rows”, “Columns” and “Values” just like constructing an Excel Pivot Table. The temptation is to think this is all the Matrix visual can do; act like, well, a typical Pivot Table: - However, depending on your knowledge of Excel Pivot tables, you’ll know that if the Matrix is just like an… Read More

By Burningsuit

Learning Power BI in Practice 15th March 2019

Case Study: Power BI Training with Harmonic Ltd

In 2018 we were booked for an on-site Power BI course with Harmonic Ltd after several of their team members attended our public course in London. Following the private course, they have been in touch with the prospect of booking onto more courses. Find out the difference between our public and private course options here. About Harmonic Ltd Based in Ilminster, Somerset, Harmonic Ltd are a managing consultancy firm working with some of the UK’s largest businesses. They provide effective… Read More

By Stuart Box

Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources 4th February 2019

New Power BI feature, embed reports securely in Web Pages

We know that we've been able to publish Power BI reports to the web for some time. It's a good feature, allowing us to publish our "Strictly Come Dancing" report so anyone can access it. But that's also the flaw in publish to Web, anyone can access, it effectively makes the whole report public property. It doesn't matter that you put the link on a secure intranet page, publish to web hosts the reports on a publicly facing web server. One… Read More

By Burningsuit

Excel Learning Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources 29th January 2019

The “Strictly” Report: Insights into the Data

Alison Box, one of our Directors and Trainers, details how she used Power BI to bring her Strictly statistics to life. In my previous blog, “The Strictly Report: Behind the Scenes”, I explained how I imported the data, cleaned and re-structured it. The next question was how was I going to explore all this data to get meaningful insights. Would I ever get to answer the “contestant journey” question that had prompted me to create the report in the first… Read More

By Burningsuit

Excel Learning Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources 21st January 2019

The “Strictly” Report: Behind the Scenes

We speak to Alison Box about how she gathered the data to create The Strictly Report. Contrary to what people might think, I’m not a raving Strictly Come Dancing fan. I find the first weeks of the competition quite entertaining when they stumble around, but when they get good it all gets a bit boring and samey. However, there’s one question regarding “Strictly” that has always intrigued me; for those that get to the final, how has their “journey” differed… Read More

By Burningsuit

Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources 10th December 2018

Power BI – Strictly Come Dancing, the Results

Power BI is a very powerful tool that is able to extract and analyse a wide range of data and produce easy to understand interactive dashboards and reports. With that in mind, we have put together a report that collates a range of different data from the popular TV programme, Strictly Come Dancing! Strictly Come Dancing in Power BI What our report includes Our report analyses a range of data, such as: “Does Craig really give the lowest scores?” “How… Read More