Category: Self-Service BI

Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Query, Power View

Build Your First Report in Microsoft Power BI Designer Part 1, Basics

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First of all I would like to briefly explain Microsoft Power BI Designer. Then we’ll see how easy we can create a report using designer. I will use Adventure Works DW database as the source database.

Microsoft Power BI Designer is basically an integration of Power Query and Power View. Saying that the tool is still a preview version and it’s NOT actually a released product we’ll expect to see more features when it’s released. Some features like PowerPivot models expected to be available to the release version. At the moment PowerPivot models are not available in the designer, but, hopefully Microsoft will add it to the tool. So I added an idea into BI in SQL vNext as I believe it would be great to have PowerPivot functionalities included in the release version of the product. We’ll see what happens.

Let’s have a look at the tool. At the first look, I would like to say it’s an amazing tool integrating lots of awesome features all together with ease of use. It’s so fun to use the tool to create very effective and flashy reports in a short amount of time. First of all you need to download the designer from here.  Install the designer and open it. I’ll use AdventureWorksDW2012 as the source database.

Open the Microsoft Power BI Designer Preview. If you want to get more familiar with the tool click on the videos on the startup screen.

·         To connect to SQL Server click on “Get Data” or “New Source”

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Power BI, Power Pivot, SQL Server

Dynamically Passing Parameters to a SQL Stored Procedure from PowerPivot Using VBA

Update September 2022:

I wrote a new blog post covering the same scenario in Excel 365.

In this post, I express an easy way to refresh a PowerPivot model dynamically based on SQL Server Stored Procedures. Let’s start with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2012 and use Adventure Works 2012 database. Run the following script to see the results in SSMS:

exec [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] 727, ‘2009-01-02’

First parameter: Start Product ID

Second Parameter: Check Date

Results:

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Now we want to see the results for the following script:

exec [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] 762, ‘2009-01-02’

 Results:

powerpivot02

Now we want to do the same with PowerPivot.

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Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server

Power Query and SQL Server Stored Procedures

Today I want to explain how you can pass parameters to a SQL Server stored procedure. I myself was looking for a way to pass parameters to a SQL Server stored proc from Power Query. I spent a lot of time to search for a good article over the internet that explains how I could pass parameters to a stored proc from Power Query and show the results in Excel. But, I couldn’t find that much information around this as I expected. So, I decided to do some work around and you can read the results in this post. To simplify the solution, I’m going to use uspGetBillOfMaterials stored procedure in AdventureWorks 2012 database. The stored procedure accepts an integer number as ProductID and a date as CheckDate. So we need to pass two parameters to uspGetBillOfMaterials  to get the results.

If we execute the stored proc in SSMS using

exec [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] 727, ‘2009-01-02’

, we’ll get the following result:

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Now, lets go to do some works on Power Query. So open Microsoft Excel and go to Power Query tab and select SQL Server database.

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Now type Server, Database and SQL Statement, then click OK.

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