A really great feature that was silently added into June update of the Power BI Desktop is a feature called View Native Query.  This feature is integrated into Power BI Query Editor and appears to give you the ability to see the queries that are running against your data… Read more

In the June update of the Power BI Desktop there were some really cool features that were added.  I’d encourage you to review the full Power BI blog to see all the June updates.  My favorite of all these new features is Row Level Security (RLS) for Power BI.… Read more

In this module you will learn how to use the KPI Indicator (This is kind of like saying “ATM Machine” isn’t it?), a Power BI Custom Visual. Power BI comes standard with a KPI visual but the custom visual we will cover in this post shows a few more options… Read more

In this module you will learn how to use the Radar Chart, a Power BI Custom Visual. The Radar Chart is sometimes is also know to some as a web chart, spider chart, or star chart.  Using the Radar Chart allows you to display multiple categories of data on each… Read more

In this module you will learn how to use the Hexbin Scatterplot Power BI Custom Visual.  The Hexbin Scatterplot is a variation of the traditional Scatter Chart but instead of using bubble size it relies on color saturation and hexbins to show value distribution.  You should consider using this chart… Read more

In this module you will learn how to use the Enlighten Aquarium Power BI Custom Visual.  While it might not be the most practical visualization it does provide a fun way to show categorical data and can have multiple series shown as well.

Module 02 – Enlighten Aquarium

Downloads

• Power…

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Welcome to an exciting new FREE class that I am launching today!  Over the next year (that’s right year!) I will be releasing one module a week detailing how to work with all of the Power BI visuals available in the Custom Visuals Gallery.  You might ask why am… Read more

Last week I did a little experimental webinar that was outside our (Pragmatic Works) norm.  Instead of our traditional 1 hour session I delivered a 3 hour workshop that took you through the end to end process of developing Power BI solutions.  The idea being to give you a taste… Read more

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In the latest Power BI Desktop a new Preview features was released that now allows you to connect using DirectQuery to either SQL Server or Azure SQL Databases.  DirectQuery is a really neat feature that allows you to point to the live version of the data source rather than importing… Read more

Today Microsoft officially released the new development tool for Power BI called Power BI Desktop.  First of all let me share my excitement in what this release means for Power BI.  The team at Microsoft has done an incredible job and the results are something they can truly be proud… Read more

**Information current as of 7/22/2015**

There’s lots of exciting news this week with Power BI so expect several short blog posts detailing each.  Here’s one you can try now that I was pretty excited to see.

So here’s the news.  You can now expose standard Excel workbooks as another asset… Read more

A date dimension or table can be extremely important when working on a Power BI project, or BI projects in general for that mater. Here’s some of the quick benefits and reasons why you need a date table:

• Helpful when filtering data
  • Filter by year, quarter, month, etc…
• Helpful for…

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With the CTP2 of SQL Server 2016 now released you may be eager to try it out.  One of the best ways to do this in my opinion is to set it up on a virtual machine.  You could certainly do this with VMWare or Hyper-V but my new preference… Read more

**Information is current as of 5/21/2015**

Recently Azure SQL Database was added as a new connection to the Power BI Preview. Read the notes about how it can be used here. The things I found especially worth noting were:

• Every action sends a query back to the database. So…

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Have you ever had a user run a query against one of your largest tables only for them to immediately filter the results in Excel to show the last years worth of data? All of that data brought across your network and then immediately filtered out. Or maybe Excel just… Read more

So you’ve come up with a great idea for a session and now you have to translate that idea into a thorough abstract that helps both organizers and attendees understand what to expect from your session. This can make the difference between you getting a session at your favorite conference… Read more

Earlier this month I began a blog series on preparing to do a technical talk. In that first post I discussed some strategies for coming up with a topic, which is ultimately the first step in your preparation.

In this post I’ll walk you through some tips for coming up… Read more

If you’re currently an Office 365 customer that is using Power BI sites then you probably found an early Christmas present this morning when you logged into your Power BI tenant.

Today Microsoft announced the Public Preview of Power BI Dashboards.  If you watched this PASS Summit Keynote (fast forward… Read more

So you’ve decided or perhaps were told to do a technical presentation. If this is something that’s new for you then you may be going through a variety of emotions. You may start excited in anticipation of the event but quickly that changes to anxiety when you realize all the… Read more