By Alison Box

DAX Microsoft Power BI in Practice 20th January 2020

The Key Influencers Visual Versus Strictly Come Dancing

The Key Influencers visual, introduced in February 2019, is Microsoft's first visual that uses "Machine Learning" to identify factors that influence the outcome of a particular metric. "Wow", I thought! The idea of leaving Power BI to do all the hard work in analysing my data seemed too irresistible to ignore, so I gave way to temptation and decided to give it a go. On the one hand, it's a very simple visual to construct (it only has 3 buckets;… Read More

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By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice 19th December 2019

Strictly Come Dancing Series 17; Report Version 2 is Here!

As I keep telling people and as I've said in previous blogs, I'm not a "Strictly" fan, I just happen to love the data and all the insights into it that Power BI can give you. So it had to be done; to update the report to include analysis for the latest series; Series 17. I've also taken the opportunity to completely re-vamp the original and many of the existing pages have been re-designed. I've added quite a few new… Read More

By Alison Box

DAX Power BI in Practice 18th November 2019

Find a Value in the Previous Row

Recently I was asked by one of our clients to solve this question; how could they calculate the number of days between customers' transactions? Clearly, in order to do this calculation, you would need to find the transaction date that was previous to the transaction date sitting in the current row. You could then subtract the earlier date from the later date and return the days between them. It occurred to me, that such a calculation could have a more… Read More

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By Alison Box

Power BI in Practice 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

Learning Power BI in Practice Power BI Resources Training 3rd October 2019
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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

DAX 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

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

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

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 by using the Analytics section of the Visualizations pane.  I then explain that the other Analytical lines (Max, Min, Average etc) are “calculations across the totals”.  But what do I actually 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… Read More