Quick measures Quick measures are a capability that allows you to use a drag-and-drop interface to quickly create measures with a minimal amount of code. Quick measures are a great way to not only easily create measures but also learn DAX. You can look at…
Gauge chart – Creating Reports
Gauge chart Often, business reports need to tell the report consumer what is happening at a glance. The gauge chart is designed to do just that. Much like a dial you might find on the dashboard of your car, the gauge chart is a semi-circular…
Understanding the capabilities of Power BI – Creating Reports
Understanding the capabilities of Power BI Reporting and visualization capabilities are the core functionalities of Power BI. After sourcing data and modeling the data, you are now well positioned to take full advantage of it. Imagine you want to show your boss gross revenue by…
Optimizing with aggregations – Optimizing Model Performance
Optimizing with aggregations Any time you want to optimize your data model, in addition to reducing the data storage by removing unnecessary columns and rows, it’s also important to consider removing data by summarizing or using group by to reduce the number of rows and/or…
When to use measures – Creating Measures Using DAX
When to use measures Measures are best used when values can or need to change based on the context. For example, the sum of revenue would change depending on the region we selected. Total revenue might be $1,000,000 with revenue across three different regions. Some…
Changing the default summarization – Creating Measures Using DAX
Changing the default summarization Power BI has many statistical functions. In fact, many of them are similar to their Excel counterparts. Many times, they can be accessed by right-clicking on the Values field in the Visualizations pane. In the dropdown, you can change the visual…
Optimizing data in the model – Optimizing Model Performance
Optimizing data in the model We’ve covered, in previous chapters, how Power BI supports directly connecting to a data store, such as connecting to an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) that has billions of records and years of sales history. When configured with DirectQuery performance, Power…
Splitting numeric and text column data – Optimizing Model Performance
Splitting numeric and text column data In the VertiPaq engine, data is stored in a columnar data format. This means for a given query or table, each column is given a data type and all records for each column are stored independently from each other,…