If you missed this year’s Microsoft Build, you missed a lot of great new feature releases from Microsoft! New features and releases are often a reflection of the investment and, therefore, commitment that companies have to certain tools and platforms.  These new features can also highlight a company’s vision or roadmap for tools and platforms, which is why last week’s bevy of Power Platform announcements have our phData Power Platform team very excited! This blog will discuss some of the features that impressed and excited us to implement them into our solutions. New Features Here are ..read more

In the May 2022 version of Power BI Desktop, Microsoft released Field Parameters as a preview feature. Field Parameters allow users to toggle between dimensions and measures with the click of a button rather than some of the more complicated workarounds needed in the past. Field Parameters will help shorten development time for Power BI reports and provide enhanced flexibility for both developers and report viewers.  In this blog post, I will walk you through what Field Parameters are, why they are important, and how to use them in an example use case. By the end of this blog, you shoul ..read more

Row-Level Security is a powerful data governance capability of Power BI and should be learned by anyone who needs to protect sensitive data. In this blog, I will provide a high-level summary of row-level security, why it is important for your team, when to use it, and how to set it up in Power BI. What is Row-Level Security, and Why Does it Matter? Row-level security (RLS) is a way to limit the data an end-user has visibility into within a Power BI report. RLS is a horizontal limitation applied to rows within a table, whereas Object-level security (OLS) is a vertical limitation that restri ..read more

Power Automate is an incredibly useful tool that can automate various tasks, seamlessly integrating with a breadth of other products, including Power BI. We can use Power Automate to create automated workflows that ingest data, sync files, trigger notifications, and much more. These workflows can be built from scratch, users can select from a library of templates, or they can customize an existing template.  In this blog, I’ll describe how to use Power Automate to set up a workflow that sends an email when a data-driven alert in Power BI is triggered.  What is a Data Driven Alert ..read more

PowerApps, one of the Power Platform tools, is Microsoft’s version of a rapid development environment to build custom apps, which also includes a data platform called Dataverse. PowerApps helps transform business’ slow and error-prone manual operations into fast and streamlined automated processes. In this blog, we will go over a use case for PowerApps and learn how to create an app for your business. Our use case will cover creating a registration app to help event organizers document and gather data from participants to help better market future events. What is PowerApps? PowerApps is a ..read more

Likert Scale Survey: Power BI Dashboard Example Connor Burton April 8, 2022 Companies administer surveys to obtain feedback on important topics. One of the most common survey styles is a Likert scale survey, which uses a five-point scale to gauge how strongly an individual agrees or disagrees with a question/statement. Based on the questions asked in the survey, the end-user can gain meaningful insights into what is going well and what needs improvement within the organization. That is the purpose of this Power BI dashboard example – it displays the results of a Likert scale survey ..read more

The Snowflake Data Cloud is an industry-leading advanced data platform provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for many businesses worldwide across data workloads. With Snowflake being a top choice for cloud-based data storage, integration with Microsoft Power BI was next in line to draw actionable insights from your data.  Despite Power BI having 130+ data connections, connecting to your data sources is simple to do in five easy steps.  In this post, we’ll explain how you can connect to your Snowflake instance as well as the most popular types of connection types you can use with ..read more

One of the most aggravating parts of being a parent is answering the same question repeatedly. Instead of simply answering the question for my daughter, I enable her to answer the question for herself and make myself available to her to answer any more difficult questions as they arise.  Microsoft’s Virtual Agents tool works in a similar manner, to enable customers, vendors, and employees to find the answers to their questions without the need for manual intervention, but allowing for escalation to a live person or other means of support.  In this blog, I will discuss what Virtual ..read more

Shared workspaces are essentially collaborative containers in Power BI Service where developers can create and edit content collectively; the type of content that can be stored in a workspace includes reports, dashboards, datasets, and dataflows.  Whether your organization needs to restrict access to a subset of sensitive data, or your developers are the only ones that need access to pre-production workspaces, understanding the different permissions that are available in Power BI Service is critical to both performance and security. In this blog, we’ll cover the four levels of access th ..read more

Every now and then, a client will ask if it’s possible to use Power BI to compare values using two manually adjustable date ranges. The answer is of course, yes. However, the steps to get there involve a couple of tricks that may not be so obvious.  All you need to make this happen are two identical date tables and the measure you’d like to compare against itself using the two date ranges. In this blog, I’ll give step-by-step directions for comparing a value with two date ranges that your users can adjust manually, using an example from a public sales dataset. What Do We Mean by Using ..read more