A question I got recently was, how can I visualize or create a dataset that can show/fetch information on a timeline? For example, I have a time-sheet and want to visualize the hours employees worked at certain projects, per day, week, month, year, and so on.
In this example I will create an order intake report. For the simple reason that for this report you can use the standard demo data in Business Central, and for time-sheets you first need to go threw a setup and then create the demo data.
Power BI has added the ability to set the Data Category property on measures as well as columns in tables. This means it is now possible to have the output of a DAX measure displayed as an image in a Power BI report and this in turn opens up a lot of new possibilities – including the ability to work around the maximum size of a text value that can be loaded into Power BI (see my previous blog post for more details) and therefore work with larger images.
DMVs (Dynamic Management Views) are, as the Analysis Services documentation states, “queries that return information about model objects, server operations, and server health”. They’re also available in Azure Analysis Service, Power BI and Power Pivot and are useful for a variety of reasons, for example for generating documentation.
The order of the columns in a table in a Power BI dataset doesn’t matter all that much, especially because the Fields pane in Power BI Desktop ignores the original column order and lists the columns in a table in alphabetical order. However there are a few situations where it is important, for example when you are using the DAX Union() function in a calculated table: as the documentation states, when you use Union() “Columns are combined by position in their respective tables”. You might also find it irritating if the columns you see in the Data or Relationships panes in the main Power BI Desktop window make it hard to browse the data or create relationships.
For a while now I’ve had an idea stuck in my head: wouldn’t it be cool to build a Power BI solution where a user could enter data into an Excel workbook and then, as soon as they had done so, they could see their new data in a Power BI report? It would be really useful for planning/budgeting applications and what-if analysis.
This is a further (third) update to an article I first wrote on 18th April 2017 and then updated on 30th Jan 2018. As Power BI becomes more and more pervasive in the business world, I am being increasingly asked “How can I build 1 master dataset, use it as the 1 version of the truth, but still allow people to do their own thing”? My concept of the Golden Dataset will allow you to do just that – read on to find out how.
One Power BI feature that almost passed me by (because it was released in August while I was on holiday) was the ability to create streaming datasets in the Power BI web app and push data to them via the Power BI REST API.