Category: Power Query

Business Intelligence - BI, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Documenter, Power Query, Self-Service BI

Empower Your Story Telling Data Visualisation in Power BI with Colour Coding

Colour Coding in Power BI

This post has been waiting in my blogging list for a while and now this is my last post in 2019. I wish you all have a wonderful year ahead.

In this post I discuss a very important aspect of data visualisation; Colour Coding. I believe, colour coding is one the most powerful and efficient ways to provide proper information to the users. We learnt as human being that the colour can tell a lot about things. For instance, we look at green grass, if it is light green we immediately understand that the grass is quite fresh and healthy. When she gets a bit yellowish, we know that she’s perhaps thirsty. When it gets brown it is probably too late.

Another perfect example is traffic lights. When it is green, everyone is happy, when it is yellow, everyone is racing to pass the junction, well, I’m just kidding, some people tend to pass the yellow light while everyone knows they have to stop when traffic light is yellow right?? And… when it is red, we have to stop. Enough saying about colour coding and its affects on our lives on a day to day basis. Let’s talk about colour coding in Power BI and quickly get to more exciting stuff.

So… colour coding in Power BI, well, we could colour code from the day first that Power BI born, but, perhaps not in a way that I’m going to explain in this post. Conditional formatting is also around for a while now. In this post I show a technique that we can implement in Power BI to use a consistent colour coding across the whole report.

Here is a report without colour coding:

Power BI Report without Colour Coding
Power BI Report without Colour Coding

And now look the same report that is colour coded:

Colour Coded Power BI Report
Colour Coded Power BI Report

Let’s get into it.

Getting Started

In this technique we’ll follow the steps below:

  • We jump online using some awesome free colour palette websites to generate the colours we’d like to use in our reports
  • We copy the HEX values and paste into Power BI (via Enter Data)
  • We define a range of numbers to identify the ranges that our values will fall into. I personally use percentage, but it might be something else in your case
  • We then define some measures to pick a specific colour for the measures we want to colour code
Continue reading “Empower Your Story Telling Data Visualisation in Power BI with Colour Coding” →
Business Intelligence - BI, DAX, Good Practices, Power BI, Power BI Desktop RS, Power Query

Good Practices: Always Display the Reporting Environment

Good Practice: Always Display the Reporting Environment

When you work on real-world projects in power BI, you would probably have different environments Like DEV, UAT, Pre-Prod and Prod. It is important for you and your audience to know what the data is coming from. Am I looking at Dev or UAT data or I am actually looking at real data in Production environment. You may have asked or been asked with a question like “Where the data is coming from?”. It is important to know how trustworthy the data you’re analysing is. In this post I show you an easy way to show the environment your Power BI report is connected to.

How It Works

To display the environment name you use query parameters, then you reference that parameter, turn it to a table and add columns to show the environments accordingly. Easy right?

Read more about query parameters from a list output here.

Depending on your scenario the implementation might be slightly different, but the principals are the same. In this post I use a SQL server database. Therefore I need to Parameterise server name. in real world you may also need to parameterise the database name. Again, if your case is quite different, like if you get data from Excel, then the Excel path can be different for different environments. Let’s dig-in.

  • Open Query Editor
  • Click “Manage Parameters”
  • Click “New”
    • Enter “Name” and “description”
    • Tick “Required”
    • Select “Text” in “Type”
    • Select “List of values” in “Suggested Values” and type in server names for different environments
    • pick a “Default Value” and “Current Value”
    • Click OK
Creating new parameter in Power BI Query Editor

So far you created a new parameter that can be used to get data from a SQL Server data source.The next steps show you how to use that parameter to show the environments in your reports.

Continue reading “Good Practices: Always Display the Reporting Environment” →
Business Intelligence - BI, Power BI, Power Query, Quick Tips

Quick Tips: Conditionally Replace Values Based on Other Values in Power Query

Power Query (M) made a lot of data transformation activities much easier and value replacement is one of them. You can easily right click on any desired value in Power Query, either in Excel or Power BI, or other components of Power Platform in general, and simply replace that value with any desired alternative. Replacing values based on certain conditions however, may not seem that easy at first. I’ve seen a lot of Power Query (M) developers adding new columns to accomplish that. But adding a new column is not always a good idea, especially when you can do it in a simple single step in Power Query. In this post I show you a quick and easy way to that can help you handling many different value replacement scenarios.

Imagine you have a table like below and you have a requirement to replace the values column [B] with the values of column [C] if the [A] = [B].

Sample Data in Power BI

One way is to add a new conditional column and with the following logic:

if [B] = [A] then [C] else [B]

Well, it works perfectly fine, but wait, you’re adding a new column right? Wouldn’t it be better to handle the above simple scenario without adding a new column? If your answer is yes then continue reading.

Continue reading “Quick Tips: Conditionally Replace Values Based on Other Values in Power Query” →
Business Intelligence - BI, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power Query, Quick Tips, Self-Service BI, T-SQL

Quick Tips: How to Filter a Column by another Column from a Different Query in Power Query

Filter a Column by a Column from a Different Query in Power Query

A while ago I was visiting a customer that asked if they can filter a query data by a column from another query in Power BI. And I said of course you can. In this post I explain how that can be achieved in Power Query. The key point is to know how to reference a query and how to reference a column of that query in Power Query. This is useful when you have a lookup table that can be sourced from every supported data source in Power Query and you want to filter the results of another query by relevant column in the lookup query. In that case, you’ll have a sort of dynamic filtering. So, whenever you refresh your model if new records have been changed in or added to the source of the lookup query, your table will automatically include the new values in the filter step in Power Query.

Referencing a Query

It is quite simple, you just need to use the name of the query. If the query name contains special characters like space, then you need to wrap it with number sign and double quotes like #”QUERY_NAME”. So, if I want to reference another query, in a new blank query, then the Power Query (M) scripts would look like below:

let
    Source = Product
in
    Source

Or something like 

let
    Source = #"Product Category"
in
    Source

Referencing a Column

Referencing a column is also quite simple. When you reference a column you need to mention the referencing query name, explained above, along with the column name in brackets. So, the format will look like #”QUERY_NAME”[COLUMN_NAME]. The result is a list of values of that particular column.

let
    Source = #"Product Category"[Product Category Name]
in
    Source
Referencing a Column from Another Query in Power Query
Continue reading “Quick Tips: How to Filter a Column by another Column from a Different Query in Power Query” →