Power BI Archives

Where are “Visualize this List” models and reports stored in Power BI?

2024-12-202024-12-20 by Christine Payton

If you’ve tried out the “visualize this list” functionality in Microsoft / SharePoint lists, you may have noticed that they’re not stored in the typical Power BI workspaces. You’re not prompted to choose a workspace to put the report in, and are instead dropped to a URL in Power BI that starts with “https://app.powerbi.com/sharepointlist/groups/”. If… Continue reading: Where are “Visualize this List” models and reports stored in Power BI?

Date Tables in Power BI

2024-11-262024-11-20 by Christine Payton

Date tables are one of my favorite things in Power BI, right up there with field parameters. Particularly the ability to make all of my date filtering relative is one of the things I really love about them – it can really reduce the maintenance for reports to have measures and filters “stick” to current… Continue reading: Date Tables in Power BI

Can you use incremental refresh on SharePoint file sources in Power BI?

2024-11-11 by Christine Payton

YES you can use incremental refresh on SharePoint files in Power BI! The trick is, the date column you use needs to be something OUTSIDE the file, such as the “created date” column in the SharePoint library. What that means, is, this is only really useful for SharePoint folder sources, where Power BI is grabbing… Continue reading: Can you use incremental refresh on SharePoint file sources in Power BI?

How to Make Your Matrix Behave

2024-11-052024-11-01 by Christine Payton

The matrix visual in Power BI is a bit fiddly to work with, particularly when you’re working with text-based data. It likes to auto-summarize any text fields you add, and typically you want a little more control over the header groupings than it wants to give. Here’s an example of what the task data looks… Continue reading: How to Make Your Matrix Behave

Sending HTML Table Emails from Power BI with Power Automate – Handling Blanks

2024-10-30 by Christine Payton

In the video tutorials for how to send a basic HTML table from Power BI with Power Automate and similar for styled tables, a question came up about what to do if the query to the Power BI dataset returned blank for a given user – if it has no rows to show, it will… Continue reading: Sending HTML Table Emails from Power BI with Power Automate – Handling Blanks

BIM Files in Power BI: You can use them as a data source!

2024-10-082024-10-02 by Christine Payton

A BIM file in Power BI holds information about the semantic model – tables, columns, measures, queries, etc. It doesn’t hold any data. You can generate a BIM file using Tabular Editor: Open a semantic model with Tabular Editor and choose “Save As” from the File menu to save a BIM file. There’s a popular… Continue reading: BIM Files in Power BI: You can use them as a data source!

Adding sources to a “thin” report

2024-09-252024-05-26 by Christine Payton

Power BI has a feature that allows you to add source tables to a report that is referencing a published semantic model. This is a really big deal in data modeling land, because previously if you wanted to add a minor table for some additional use case that you only needed for one report, you… Continue reading: Adding sources to a “thin” report

Microsoft Planner / Project for the Web Color Label Values

2024-09-252024-04-23 by Christine Payton

If you use Microsoft Planner or Project for the Web, you’re probably familiar with the colored labels you can add to tasks. These can be renamed to whatever you like; they’re used to “flag” tasks. When we pull this task data into Power BI, we lose a lot of the label details. If we’re using… Continue reading: Microsoft Planner / Project for the Web Color Label Values

If Power Platform apps were animals, what would they be?

2024-09-252024-02-17 by Christine Payton

This started out as a offhand question to ChatGPT just to see what it came up with, but it ended up being WAY more insightful than I expected, so I did a few more to share them. Me, anthropomorphizing? YES ALWAYS. By the way, NEVER ask me “if you were an animal, what would you… Continue reading: If Power Platform apps were animals, what would they be?