Power BI 19 blogposts

Power BI reports are used within your organisation via a browser, mobile app, Excel and, last but not least, via Teams.

It may sometimes be necessary to highlight certain findings or a specific connection and communicate these “offline”, to external partners for example.

In a Power BI report, you can simply copy certain visuals (either filtered or not) to integrate them into reports, presentations, email communications and/or chat messages.

You can access your organisation's Power BI reports through a browser, the mobile app, Excel and, last but not least, through Teams.

However, not all users need to have daily access to the Power BI report in order to keep up with the results.

These users can simply subscribe to one or more pages of a Dashboard or Report, which can be emailed to them at their preferred frequency and time.

This is a very smart and spontaneous way to keep track of specific reports.

Reports often have several filter options, multiple “slicers”, you can filter by visual, by page or the whole report, and then of course, there’s the interaction from other visuals. This often results in a number of clicks before you have chosen the right setting for a view.

The use of personal bookmarks is ideal for this: you make a series of selections which you save, and then you work on the basis of those selections.

If you want to use a Power BI Report to tell a story during a presentation, then this feature is invaluable. You set your personal bookmark in advance, instead of making selections “live”.  It saves a lot of clicks, and makes the transition from situation to situation seamless, eliminating the risk of making a wrong selection.

We often look at the data in a Power BI report and take action based on what we see.

If I pull a list of pending tasks from a report and filter them based on their due date or priority, I’ll likely see a few urgent tasks and want to send out reminders to the colleagues they’re assigned to. Of course, I could write a new e-mail for every task and include the necessary details manually - but that would be an incredibly time-consuming and tedious job, wouldn’t it?

Luckily, we can count on Power Automate to make things easy for us.

In many Power BI datasets, you’ll notice a separate table containing measures.  While this isn’t really necessary, it can be useful.

The downside is that as the number of measures grows, this table will be absolutely flooded with measures, which makes it hard to find the measure you need.

The usual solution for this problem is creating folders in the table... but at first sight, it looks like you can only create folders at the table level, not within the folders themselves.  It is possible, though - if you know how.

We’ve watched Teams grow into a central knowledge and communication hub in most organisations. One of the perks of this software is the fact that you can share and use your reports and analyses in it. In this post, we’ll explain how you can embed your Power BI reports in Teams.

In most organisations, reports in Power BI and on other BI platforms are created by specialists in consultation with the person who requested the report. While these reports meet most expectations, there are situations where users need or want to have their data presented in a different way. They might want to include an additional perspective that wasn’t in the original report, for example.

This need is often temporary and doesn’t require the existing report to be changed.

To accommodate this, Power BI now offers users the option to change the way visuals are displayed. This option is called ‘Personalize Visuals’. The precursor to this option, ‘Decomposition Tree’, was similar in some ways. In this blog post, I’ll shed some light on both options.

When you create a report in Power BI, you can use different kinds of visuals which are designed to let you analyse data from different perspectives. There are also several methods available to distil additional information from your data, such as drill-down, drill-through, and interactivity between visualisations.

In many organisations, Power BI reports or data sets are created centrally. For reports, this means the organisation aims to create them with a standard setup.

Power BI is a ‘Self-Service BI’ platform, a solution that was developed to give any average user the means to build their own reports and gain insight into specific analyses or questions.  Of course, Power BI offers a ‘light’ version of BI, because not everyone is knowledgeable about BI or has experience with it.

One of the things you can do with Power BI is create reports based on existing data sets. Data sets are the foundation of a report: they contain one or several data sources that have been prepared for use in a data set where needed, as well as the necessary calculations for the analyses performed on these data.

Power BI offers a range of beautiful visuals that help you present your data in an attractive way. Sometimes, this may lead to a choice overload: which visual fits your purpose best?