Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App, Power Query

Data Visualisation with Power BI Desktop

As most of you guys know Power BI Desktop is released. I should say, it’s awesome. There are heaps of changes in compare with its preview edition Power BI Designer. I’ve written a series of posts regarding creating a report and dashboard using Power BI Designer before. You can find them here. Now I want to explain the same thing in Power BI Desktop. I’ll cover lots of new features in this post and I hope you enjoy it.

Get Data

Open Power BI Desktop
Click on Get Data. You can also get data from recent data sources or even open a predefined report stored in pbix format

We use Adventure Works DW 2012 database as sample, you can open your real world data source
Click on “SQL Server Database” then “Connect”
In this sample we are connecting to a “SQL Server Database”
Click “Connect”

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On-premises Data Gateway Personal Mode, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Pivot, Power Query

Refreshing On-Prem SQL Server Database on Power BI using Power BI Personal Gateway

It’s been awhile that lots of us were waiting for this feature. And some of us like me just tried to build it in our way. I spent some time to develop something similar using OData in combination with IIS and Basic Authentication features. Well, it was sort of successful and unsuccessful simultaneously! I mean, I was able to refresh SQL Server data remotely, but, when it came down to refreshing the dataset uploaded into the cloud Power BI it just failed. It was mainly because of the method that Power BI uses to refresh data.

By the way, I’m glad to see that we are finally able to refresh an on-premises SQL Server database from Power BI website. Refreshing data is very crucial for every report and dashboard which is working on top of frequently changing database. So we need to be able to schedule a data refresh on the cloud. Yesterday Microsoft announced a new gateway specially designed for supporting data refresh for on-premises data sources as below:

SQL Server
Oracle
Teradata
IBM DB2
PostgreSQL
Sybase
MySQL
SharePoint List
SQL Analysis Services Tabular model (uploaded data, not live connections)
File (CSV, XML, Text, Excel, Access)
Folder
Custom SQL/Native SQ

As you see SQL Server is not the only one.

Installing Power BI Personal Gateway

It’s easy to install the Gateway. Just make sure that meet the following requirements:

The machine that you’re going to install the Gateway on it should be always up and running
You can NOT install the Gateway on the same machine as a Power BI Analysis Services Connector

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DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View

What is new for BI in Excel 2016

It’s been awhile that we are waiting for a sensible improvements in Microsoft self-service BI. The good news is that finally there will be some cool new features added to the next version of Excel which is Excel 2016. By some, I mean, well, there not a lot new BI features, but, some. Something is better than nothing, not too bad though!

Integrating BI features with Excel:

Power View and Power Map:

As you know, Power Pivot was integrated as a built-it feature to Excel 2013. Now I’m really happy that the same thing happened to Power View and Power Map. So you don’t need to install them separately. You can now turn these features on from:

File–> Options–> Advanced-> (scroll down the page) Data-> Enable Data Analysis Add-ins: Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map