Power BI Archives - Page 8 of 29

Datazen, Excel, Mobile BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Desktop RS, Power BI Paginated, SQL Server Reporting Services - SSRS, Tableau Software

Power BI 101, Report Authoring Tools

This is my last blog post in 2021. I wish you all a wonderful break and a happy new year.

In the first post of my Power BI 101 series, we learnt that Power BI is a data platform containing various tools and services. We also explained the currently available subscriptions within the Power BI platform. The focus of the second post of this series is on what we should learn to achieve our goals more efficiently. In this post, we focus on the reporting tools available to us according to our subscription plan. From this post onwards, we discuss more specific aspects of the Power BI platform.

We learnt so far that Power BI is not just a reporting tool to build sophisticated reports; it is indeed a platform supplying a wide range of features from data preparation, data modelling and data visualization to contribute to an organisation’s data analysis journey in many ways such as sharing datasets, reports, and dashboards. All of these are possible only if we take the correct steps in building our Power BI ecosystem. But, it is very true that Power BI gives us the flexibility to create professional-looking and eye-catching visualisations providing easy to understand insights around a subject. The most renowned tool within Power BI is Power BI Desktop, but it is not the only tool available to us to create reports. Besides, Power BI Desktop reports are not necessarily the best answer to all business requirements. In fact, the business requirements define the Power BI architecture that supports those requirements. Based on the architecture, organisations decide to acquire a certain subscription plan, and based on the subscription plan, we have various reporting tools available to us. At this point, you might ask, “well, what architecture supports my organisation requires?”. Let’s answer that question in a future blog post.

For the purpose of this blog post, it is enough to know what reporting tools are available under which subscription plans. Let’s get started.

Reporting tools available in Power BI

As mentioned earlier, there are various reporting tools available to us. Let’s first see what reporting tools are available to us regardless of the subscription plans. Then we will look at the subscription plans supporting those tools.

Power BI Service

Power BI Service is a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering from Microsoft in the cloud. The users within an organisation, depending on their access rights, may create reports directly in Power BI Service. The users can also securely share and distribute those reports. While creating or editing reports is possible in Power BI Service, it is strongly recommended to avoid this method for several reasons. The most obvious one is that the changes we make to a report may soon get overwritten by someone else that republishes the same report from Power BI Desktop. Check this blog post from SQLChick to see why you should avoid creating or editing reports directly from Power BI Service. The reports are downloadable in PBIX format.

You can access Power BI Service here.

Power BI Desktop

It is a desktop application built for data preparation, data modelling and data visualisation. If you like to learn about data modelling with Power BI, check out my book here. We can use Power BI Desktop to connect to more than 250 different data sources, preparing, transforming and cleansing that data and at lastly visualising the data. Power BI Desktop is the predominant and most renowned report authoring tool available in the Power BI platform. It has many more functionalities and is more flexible than Power BI Service. For instance, setting up Role Level Security (RLS) is not available in Power BI Service. The file format of the reports created in Power BI Desktop is PBIX.

Download Power BI Desktop from here.

Power BI Report Builder (Paginated)

Paginated reports aka pixel-perfect reports are formatted in a way to fit perfectly on a page. That report page might later be printed. We have exact control over page formatting to display our data in tables or charts. The reports are not as interactive as the reports created in Power BI Desktop.

Paginated reports are based on RDL technology which is standard report format in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The tool for developing a paginated report in the Power BI ecosystem is Power BI Report Builder. The reports file type is RDL. We can currently publish Paginated reports only to a Workspace that is backed with either a Premium Per User (PPU) or a Premium Capacity.

Download Power BI Report Builder from here.

Power BI Desktop Optimised for Report Server (RS)

Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) is an on-premises server capable of rendering Power BI report files (PBIX). If we have a PBIRS up and running within our organisation and we require to publish Power BI reports to PBIRS, then we will need to create our reports in a special edition of Power BI Desktop which is optimised for PBIRS. This edition is different from Power BI Desktop, which we usually use to create and publish our reports to Power BI Service. For instance, Power BI Desktop RS does not include the preview features we used to see in Power BI Desktop until those features are released. Building reports in Power BI Desktop RS guarantees that the reports are fully functional after being deployed to our PBIRS. We can install Power BI Desktop and Power BI Desktop RS side-by-side on the same machine.

Download Power BI Desktop RS from here.

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Data Visualisation, Dataflows, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded Capacity, Power BI Governance, Power BI Paginated, Power BI Premium Capacity, Power BI Service, Power Query, Self-Service BI

Power BI 101, What Should I Learn?

This is the second part of my new series of Power BI posts named Power BI 101. In the previous post, I briefly discussed what Power BI is. In this post, I look into one of the most confusing parts for those who want to start learning Power BI. Many people jump straight online and look for Power BI training courses which there are plenty out there. But which one is the right training course for you? Let’s find out.

What do you want to gain from learning Power BI?

Regardless of attending paid training courses or being a self-learner, the above question is one of the most important questions you might ask yourself before going to the next steps. The answer to this question dictates the sort of training you must look for. Your answer to the preceding question can be one or none of the following:

I am a graduate/student looking at the job market
I am a business analyst and I want to know how Power BI can help you with my daily job
I am a database developer and I want to learn more about business intelligence and data and analytics space
I am a non-Microsoft Business Intelligence developer and I want to start learning more about Microsoft offerings
I am a system admin and I have to manage our Power BI tenant
I am a data scientist and I want to know how I can use Power BI
I am just ciourious to see what Power BI can do for me

As mentioned, your answer might not be any of the above, but, thinking about your reason(s) for learning Power BI can help you to find the best way to learn and use Power BI more efficiently. You can spend time and money taking some online courses and get even more confused. You don’t want that do you?

So, whatever reason(s) you have in mind to learn Power BI, most probably you fall into one of the following user categories:

Think about your goal(s) and what you want to achieve by learning Power BI then try to identify your user category. For instance, if you are a student thinking of joining an IT company as a data and analytics developer, then your user category is most probably a Power BI Developer or a Contributor.

To help you find out your user category let’s see what the above user categories mean.

Power BI Developers

The Power BI Developers are the beating hearts of any Power BI development project. Regardless of the project you will be involved with, you definitely require to have a certain level of knowledge of the following:

Data preparation/ETL processes
Data warehousing
Data modelling/Star schema
Data visualisation

To be a successful Power BI developer you must learn the following languages in Power BI:

Power Query
DAX

Depending on the types of projects you will be involved in, you may require to learn the following languages as well:

Microsoft Visual Basic (for Paginated Reports)
Python
R
T-SQL
PL/SQL

As a Power BI developer, you will write a lot of Power Query and DAX expressions. Most probably you require to learn T-SQL as well. The following resources can be pretty helpful:

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Dataflows, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power Query

Combining X Number of Rows in Power Query for Power BI, Excel and Power Query Online

A while back, I was working on a project involving getting data from Excel files. The Excel files contain the data in sheets and tables. Getting the data from the tables is easy. However, the data in the sheets have some commentaries on top of the sheet, then the column names and then the data itself. Something like below:

This approach is pretty consistent across many Excel files. The customer wants to have the commentary in the column names when the data is imported into Power BI. So the final result must look like this:

The business requirement though is to combine the first 3 rows of data and promote it as the column name.

The Challenge

Let’s connect the Excel file and look at the data in Power BI Desktop.

Connecting to sample data from Power BI Desktop

As you can see in the preceding image, Power BI, or more precisely, Power Query, sees the data in Table format. After we click the Transform Data button, this is what we get in Power Query Editor:

Connected to sample data from Power Query in Power BI Desktop

We all know that tables consist of Columns and Rows. The conjunction of a column and a row is a Cell. What we require to do is to concatenate the values of cells from the first three rows. We also have to use a Space character to separate the values of each cell from the others.

Column, rows and cells in a Table in Power BI — Column, rows and cells in a Table

In Power Query, we can get each row of data in as a Record with the following syntax:

Table{RecordIndex}

In the above syntax, the Table can be the results of the previous transformation step, and the RecordIndex starts from 0. So to get the first row of the table in the preceding image, we use the following syntax:

#"Changed Type"{0}

Where the #"Changed Type" is the previous step. Here are the results of running the preceding expression:

So we can get the second and third rows with similar expressions. The following image shows the entire codes in the Advanced Editor:

Power Query expressions in Advanced Editor in Power BI Desktop — Power Query expressions in Advanced Editor

But how do we concatenate the values of the rows?

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Business Intelligence - BI, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded Capacity, Power BI Premium Capacity, Power BI Service, Self-Service BI

Power BI 101, What is Power BI

Many people talk about Power BI, its benefits and common challenges, and many more want to learn Power BI, which is excellent indeed. But there are many misconceptions and misunderstandings amongst the people who think they know Power BI. In my opinion, it is a significant risk in using tools without knowing them, and using the technology is no different. The situation is even worse when people who must know the technology well don’t know it, but they think they do. These people are potential risks to the businesses that want to adopt Power BI as their primary analytical solution across the organisation. As a part of my day-to-day job, I communicate with many people interacting with Power BI. Amongst many knowledgeable users are some of those who confuse things pretty frequently, which indicates a lack of understanding of the basic concepts.
So I decided to write a series of Power BI 101 to explain the basics of the technology that we all love in simple language. Regardless of your usage of Power BI, I endeavour to help you know what to expect from Power BI. This is the first part of this series.

What is Power BI?

I do not frequently get the “What is Power BI” question from my customers, my website’s comments, or my students within the training courses. It is indeed a question that I often ask people. I usually ask the question to indicate people’s level of understanding on different occasions, such as when a friend wants to know more about Power BI, or in a job interview from a candidate who applied for a Power BI related role, or my students attending a training course. Depending on the context that I ask the question, the responses are often pretty different.

It is the general rule of thumb to know what a “thing” is before using it. The “What is X?” (and X is the name of a “thing”) is a broad question, so the answer is also broad. Therefore we usually need more digging to get a better understanding of the “thing”.

In our case, the “thing” is Power BI, so the question is “What is Power BI?”. And the answer is:

“Power BI is the Business Analytics platform part of a larger SaaS platform called Power Platform offering from Microsoft.”

Now, let’s dig a bit more with two more questions:

What is a Data Platform?
What is Saas?

Let’s quickly answer those questions.

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Tag: Power BI

Power BI 101, Report Authoring Tools