Can you believe how amazing and hectic March has been?! So many community members got to experience some major conferences all next to each other. We had the MVP Summit, SQLBits, and the first ever Microsoft Fabric Conference! And, I had the chance to participate in all three! THANKS to the virtual option for MVP Summit. It made it all possible. SQL Bits SQLBits is seriously the best conference ever. In the community keynote, Chris Webb said, “I’ll go until I physically can’t anymore,” and that’s the truth. It’s a bunch of people who love the same stuff, all super hyped to learn, meet new ..read more

Like many I am also playing with Fabric, many of my clients are also excited about Fabric and want to know more about it. Being a solution architect in the consulting world one of the most common questions I get asked is: “When certain features will be available, Where are they in the roadmap?”. That’s what sparked the idea of scraping the Microsoft Fabric Roadmap and creating this Power BI report. It is based on a Direct Lake connection, so it has been a bit temperamental. So, what did I do it? If you are not interested in the whole story. Here is Python code you can run to get a road map. If ..read more

If you are a consultant like me, you know how hard it can be to access Power BI Admin API or Service Principal. Sometimes, you need to see all the workspaces you have permission for and what’s inside them. Well, I found with MS Fabric, we can use notebooks and achieve it with a few steps: Get Tennant ID Connect to Tennant for POWER BI Call POWER BI REST API, get data and save data in Lake House Report using Power BI If you are new to Microsoft Fabric and Notebooks, checkout this series on MS Docs – How to use notebooks – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn. Get Tennant ID There might be s ..read more

I had been following the hints and clues on Twitter, where some Power BI team members were changing their job titles to Synapse. I was curious and hopeful about what they were working on, but I also didn’t want Power BI to lose momentum. When I saw the leadership changes, I felt reassured that whatever they did would be amazing. Fast forward, at Build, Microsoft announced the long-awaited Microsoft Fabric. What is it? It’s a SaaS Data Fabric platform with a common data lake called OneLake. It’s a one-stop shop for all the analytics needs of every enterprise. With fabric, there is no need to st ..read more

A colleague of mine came to me with an interesting use case, “ Switch between a summarized value or selected value with multiple legends”. For example, I have five countries and their GDP values. When the end user goes to the report, the user would like to see the average GDP of all countries, but when the user selects single or multiple countries on the slicers, the line chart should show only selected values. Like below: Default viewSelected view There are multiple ways to achieve this; some are more elegant than others. Layering visuals First, I create two DAX measures to show values based ..read more

I recently worked on two projects where the client wanted to show multiple metrics sliced by the same categorical data. For example, seeing how various metrics are performing over different regions or different product groups. A use case like this can be achieved in many ways; probably the best approach is to use small multiples functionality or to keep it simple, five same visuals with different metrics. Let’s look into it with energy consumption data. Here, I want to show metrics 1 to 5 on different income levels over the years. Five different visuals When you know exactly how many categorie ..read more

In one of the projects, I was working on, I received feedback saying it is hard to understand how many items they have selected in a slicer, and it is not the first time I came across this. It is a valid point, especially when you have quite a few items in a slicer, you use a search bar to look for items, you select a couple, but you were not sure how many were selected. https://cdn.dribbble.com/users/124059/screenshots/3995796/shot.gif Obviously, there are many solutions to one problem. I have seen many reports displaying custom labels to handle this situation. Still, after some research for ..read more

In my recent open data project, I created a single page report model with a sparse slicer. It’s a good trick for anyone who wants to make their slicer look a bit sleeker. Like any other visual in Power BI, Slicers also have many properties. By default, below is how slicer looks in Power BI, but I made few changes to make it look like the one on left, in a few steps. Steps Place the slicer on the report page Go to Items in Properties, add a frame around items Go to General in properties, update outline weight, I prefer anything more than 7 or 8  Change Outline color to your visual bac ..read more

The inspiration behind this post solely came from WHO website https://www.who.int/. I went onto to check some COVID data and found quick links on the main page quite interesting, hence this post. Using Buttons in Power BI is straight forward, and we see many Power BI report designers using it more often. What I observed, not everyone uses the amazing extra functionalities of Power BI Buttons. In this post, I want to use properties of Buttons, Shapes and try to achieve the look and feel I saw on the WHO website. The look I am going for is below:   Let’s see how we can create it in Power B ..read more

Power BI Bookmarks, the secret behind many sleek reports, It revolutionised the entire PBI Report design approach. Initially, Bookmarks were portrayed more as some saved views, which can be used for storytelling than for navigation. However, we certainly saw more report designers using Bookmarks for navigation than for storytelling. In March 2020, we have a new functionality called Page navigation,  which brings us to the dilemma of which one to use and when? #PowerBI Bookmarks vs Page Navigation Power BI Page Navigation is an ac ..read more