Analyst in Action

Just think of a scenario, you are working on a Power BI report that is created by multiple developers and now you are debugging it. If you have no knowledge of the ins and outs of it you will get jaded by it very soon. But what if you see some description or textual information within the report? That will be the ray of light 💡.  As a best practice, if you are creating any report from scratch try to add a description to almost everything. Starting from the tables, columns, measures, calculation groups, field parameters..... How to do it? Okay, let's start by providing a description of the tables. I am using Sample Superstore data and want to provide a description - Contains sales data. To do so, go to the data model view. Select the table where you need to add the description. Under properties, you can provide a description under the description section. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!! That's basic and at Analyst in Action, we always strive to go beyond the basic knowledge. Let...

Let's think of a scenario, where you want to copy the bookmarks from one report to another. Most obvious approach is to just do a copy paste of the bookmarks. What's wrong with this approach? This approach only works for all visuals but not for bookmarks and field parameters.  If you are not familiar with basics of bookmarks and field parameters do refer to the beginners guide for bookmarks  and introduction to field parameters . Then how do you copy the bookmarks? Power BI enhanced report format (PBIR) for Power BI Project files (PBIP) will help you in achieving this. Let's check it out, I have 2 reports one contains the bookmark called Bookmarks PBIR Test (origin) and other one is Rolling Average PBIR Test (destination) .  Before we get started, you have to enable Power BI Project save option under preview features. Once enabled, restart Power BI desktop. There is a TMDL icon appearing on the left pane. What is TMDL and what's in it for me? There's a lot of possi...

Let's think of a scenario where you have asked to batch edit your long list of DAX, create repetitive measures over and over, copy whole set of measures from one PBIX to another. Until January 2025, if I encounter all those scenarios I always think of some external tools to achieve it. But but but Power BI does listen to you 😂 and now we have TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language). In today's blog we will explore the capabilities of TMDL.  Before we get started, TMDL is still in Preview features. You need to enable it under your settings and restart your Power BI desktop. You will see an icon for TMDL on the left pane. To learn more about TMDL do visit the detailed article from Microsoft Once you click on the TMDL it will lead to a separate section with all the introductory steps. To start with, we will change the summarise by for all columns from none to sum. Just drag and drop the Sample Superstore table. You can edit the none to Summarise by section for every column to S...

DAX Studio has proved to be a great external tool for Power BI and we have prepared a beginner's guide on the most common use cases that one can encounter while using it. This week we will focus on going a level beyond and discover a bit more advanced use cases that will help you to use DAX Studio in a better way. Ultimate goal for today's article is to surpass the beginner level and reach advanced level of DAX Studio. We would recommend to first have a quick read on the beginner's guide before continuing here. In this article we will focus on running benchmark on your queries, formatting queries both short line and long line, defining dependent measures and lastly and one of my favourite importing performance data in DAX Studio. Before we start make sure you have the latest version of DAX Studio installed. Let's get started, with the simplest of the use cases - writing and formatting queries in DAX Studio. Generally, this is more towards enhancing the readability of ...

We know all the multitudes of Power BI and how it evolved over the years but have you ever thought what if you do not require all those fancy visuals and features but you need a flat table fitting in a single page and can go on for more than 100s of pages. If you are looking for something like this then Paginated Reports is the answer for you. In today's blog we will pen down everything you need to know about Paginated Reports. To know more about the Paginated Reports do read this interesting article from Microsoft. Before we start you will require - Report Builder (external tool but a FREE one) and Power BI Pro license along with the contributor rights to publish the paginated reports to different workspaces. Also, we will be working with Sample Superstore dataset. We are aiming to create a paginated report which will look something like this. Let's get started then, make sure you have published your dashboard in a workspace. For this demo, we have published the dashboard to...