By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice 26th November 2020

“Strictly Come Dancing” Telling the Story Behind the Numbers with Power BI

Back in March this year, I did think I'd be relieved of my duty of updating the Strictly Come Dancing Power BI Report to reflect another series. To be quite honest, I was hoping this would be the case. I first created the Report for Series 16, updated it for Series 17 but felt that perhaps the Report had now served its time. But who would've thought that "Strictly" would survive the Pandemic! So of course, I had no option… Read More

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By Alison Box

DAX Power BI in Practice 12th November 2020
Burningsuit bottle on a beach image

How DAX Treats Nulls & Zeros

In DAX there is a special way to identify null or empty values and that's by using a value called "blank". In order to return blank values, we can use the BLANK() function e.g. 10 Percent = IF ( Winesales[CASES SOLD] > 100, Winesales[CASES SOLD] * 0.1, BLANK () ) When constructing DAX expressions using IF, if you want to return BLANK() on the "Value if false" argument, you can just close off on the bracket because BLANK() is the… Read More

By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice 26th October 2020
The Matrix

The 8th Secret of the Matrix Visual: Controlling Calculations and Labels on Subtotals

Since I wrote my blog on The 7 Secrets of the Matrix Visual in April 2019, the world has changed (in so many ways) and things have moved on with the Matrix Visual. With this in mind, I thought it was time for an update to that article. I've been wanting to do this for some time because I know from the popularity of my blog that lots of you are particularly excited by the Matrix (the visual that is,… Read More

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By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice 21st July 2020
An example of a really bad Pie Chart

7 Secrets of the Pie Chart

I suppose I shouldn't really be writing this blog because the question has to be asked, why are you using a pie chart? But if you really must, at the very least make your pie charts unambiguous and preferably, interesting. Let's not have anything anymore that looks like this:- An example of a really bad pie chart! So I'm hoping that by revealing my seven secrets below, you'll either never use a pie chart again or at least you'll produce… Read More

By Stuart Box

Power BI in Practice Power BI Premium 14th July 2020

Sentiment Analysis in Power BI, analyse text reviews and a Premium tip.

Power BI is great at analysing numeric data. Numbers like values, costs, stock holdings and averages can all be worked up into informative charts and visualisations. But what if your data isn't like that? What if your data is more textual, like product reviews, staff evaluations or survey results? How can you visualise that data with Power BI ? This post explains how you can work with that sort of data in Power BI using the AI Insights in Power… Read More

By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice 10th July 2020
7 Secrets of the Power BI Line Chart

7 Secrets of the Line Chart

The line chart is the go-to chart type to visualise data over time. Typically, this visual is used to analyse your data by year, quarter, month or by day. It should be an easy thing to do to create a line chart that plots your data in the way you want. But beware, there are secrets lurking behind the benign line chart! Here are my top seven. [latestCourse] #1 There Are Two Different Types of X-Axis The default x-axis, along… Read More

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By Burningsuit

Learning Online Training Training 22nd June 2020
Live Power BI Training

The Benefits of Online Training for Businesses

Offering your staff training courses to improve their skills can be extremely beneficial to your business; not only will it allow you to improve your offering to your customers, but it also gives staff a huge morale boost. In this current climate, traditional classroom training is not possible, but online training has become increasingly popular. Our usual Power BI training in London can’t run at the moment but we are proud to be able to offer Live Online Power BI… Read More

By Stuart Box

Cloud DAX Learning Online Training Power BI in Practice Virtual Classrooms 8th April 2020

Live Online Power BI Training from Burningsuit

We have many years' experience of training people how to use Microsoft Power BI. Up to now our training has all been face-to-face, either as open public courses in London or private on-site training. Obviously due to the current coronavirus restrictions this type of course is not possible, so we're launching Live Online PowerBI training. Having had experience in online training in the past we're confident that this will provide a first-class learning experience in these difficult times. What is… Read More

By Alison Box

DAX Power BI in Practice 16th March 2020

Power BI Conditional Formatting

I thought this would be an easy blog. Not much to say about using Power BI's Conditional Formatting. All it does is make visuals look more appealing by using pretty colours based on the data's values. How wrong I was! In fact there's so much to say that I've had to resort to a mini contents page using outline numbering and links to the relevant paragraphs. In fact, just like the old days of writing user manuals! So here goes… Read More

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