A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about dynamic filtering in Power BI — and how to display different measures within one visual, depending on the user’s selection — without using bookmarks!

Last week, I’ve got a similar request from my client. In fact, this time the request was the other way around — they want to see the same metric (measure), but from different perspectives — for example, total sales amount per country and brand name, depending on user’s choice.

Again, this could have been done using bookmarks and switching between different page states. However, I’ve wanted…

If you follow my blog on a regular basis, you are already aware that I prefer describing real-life use cases to writing some pure theoretical stuff…Don’t get me wrong — of course, you should be able to understand core theoretical and conceptual foundations behind specific solutions, before diving into a real fun, but solving real-world problems is something that counts in the end.

Scenario

As I live in a speaking area that has special characters in addition to a “regular” alphabet (for those of you who don’t know, I live in Austria, where the German language is being spoken), I’ve recently…

I like Power BI, I really do! If you follow my articles carefully, you would have realized that I truly consider Power BI as an awesome tool — because it gives you an infinite number of possibilities to tell your data story. And, I’m not referring only to out-of-the-box solutions, but also custom-made ones.

However, I’ve recently come across an interesting problem (or, to be brutally honest, it didn’t look so interesting why I was trying to solve it). So, what was it all about?

Scenario

I was helping my client to build a Power BI report, and one of the…

Once upon a time, your old scary DBA walked into your office with a red-colored face and asked you furiously: “What the hell you’ve done with your Power BI report?! It killed all of our workloads!!!”

You knew why he was angry, even before he started screaming at you. It’s because of “that” report which uses DirectQuery because your users wanted “near real-time” data…

I’ve already written why you should reconsider using DirectQuery, and in which scenarios (maybe) it makes sense to go that path.

However, it appeared that your DBA is not that “bad” as you might think. He…

What are my best-selling products? Which customers spend the most money on my services? Which stores sold the most units of our luxury brand? Answering these, and many more similar questions are one of the most common requests when creating Power BI reports.

In order to enable proper business decisions based on answers to the questions specified above, we need to identify the respective values and sort them accordingly.

DAX offers two different functions for dealing with sorting — RANKX and TOPN. As you can intuitively conclude, the TOPN function can help you identify, let’s say, the top 5 most…

Despite my planning not to write any “serious” blog posts till the end of the year (I just wanted to create some entertaining stuff), a recent announcement from Microsoft that Serverless SQL Pool within Synapse now supports a whole new set of T-SQL functions forced me to change my initial plans and play around with the latest stuff.

Honestly, I was curious to test how PIVOT works in the synergy between Power BI and Synapse, as this is one of the most used transformations in Power BI.

Before you proceed reading, maybe you would like to check the article where…

If you’ve carefully followed the latest data news, you should have noticed that Microsoft made two important announcements a few weeks ago: the first, Azure Synapse Analytics became GA, while the other also caused a lot of interest: by introducing Azure Purview as the evolution of Azure Data Catalog, Microsoft proclaimed that this new solution will serve as a unified data governance and data management platform.

At the moment of writing, Purview is still in preview, so we can expect that specific features will evolve over time, and that some new features will find their place under the Purview umbrella.

…

Images are one of the most powerful tools to enhance your Power BI reports and present the data story in a more meaningful and “colorful” way (please don’t take this “colorful” meaning literally). And, when it comes to working with images, Power BI offers you a whole range of capabilities — some of them I’ve examined in this article.

Upload background image

Adding an image as a background for your report page is fairly simple. I’ve downloaded this photo from Unsplash and, in literally a few clicks, I would set this photo as my report page background: