Author: Soheil Bakhshi

Business Intelligence - BI, DAX, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Desktop RS, Self-Service BI

How to Define A Measure Table in Power BI Desktop

In this post I show you a simple trick to make your Power BI model more organised and more readable. I call it creating a “Measure Table”. Let me explain. The story is that I was working on a model with lots of tables. The database schema was NOT a proper star schema so there were a bunch of measures spread into lots of different tables. On top of that we’ve created lots of calculated measures with different home tables which made it really hard to find a particular measure or calculated measure. I thought, well, when it is that hard to find the calculated measures at development time how hard it could be for a customer to find, understand and use the measures we created. The visibility of the calculated measures could be an issue when we have lots of measures in lots of different tables. You will soon feel the issue in customer training sessions when you need to navigate between lots of different tables to find a calculated measure.

Consider you create a Power BI model with direct connect to a SSAS Multidimensional instance. You will immediately notice that all measure groups have a special calculation icon (Measure Group Icon in Power BI) rather than a normal table icon (Table icon in Power BI) which makes the measure groups more recognisable for the end users. For instance, you can easily find any calculated measure related to “Internet Sales” under the “Internet Sales” measure group.

Measure Groups in SSAS Multidimensional Dirct Connect

I know, we can search and find the measures very easily, but, our model would be more organised and more user friendly if we can put all measures in one or more tables which contain just related calculated measures and nothing else. For instance, we can create a measure table for time intelligence calculations and name it “Sales Time Intelligence Measures” and put all  calculated measures like “Sales YTD”, “Sales LYTD”, “Sales Period Over Period” on it. It will make your model nice and clean, easy to use and easy to learn for your customers. It will also help you to train your customers more easily.

In this article I’ll connect to a SQL Server instance and will use the famous Adventure Works database. I also show you how to get the job done in both “Import” and “DirectQuery” modes as there are some limitations applied to the DirectQuery mode which makes it harder to do what we want.

Lets start.

Continue reading “How to Define A Measure Table in Power BI Desktop” →

Power BI, Power BI Desktop

How to Disable Custom Visual in Power BI Desktop Model

Update Sep 2022: I wrote this blogpost in Mar 2016. Power BI Desktop improved a lot since then. Currently, Power BI Administrators can Enable or Disable custom visuals for the reports published to Power BI Service from Power BI Admin Portal across the organisation or to certain security groups. There are also some settings for system administrators to Enable or Disable custom visuals on the user’s Power BI Desktop across the organisation via group policy settings. The users can also remove custom visuals from Power BI Desktop by following these steps:

  1. Clicking the ellipsis button on the Visuals pane
  2. Clicking Remove a visual
  3. Selecting the custom visual
  4. Clicking the Remove button
Removing Custom Visuals From Power BI Desktop
Removing Custom Visuals From Power BI Desktop

Disclaimer: The method described in this post includes modifying Power BI file (PBIX) outside of Power BI Desktop. It is highly recommended to take a backup of your PBIX file beforehand. It’s highly probable that you corrupt your PBIX file if make a mistake when following the method described here. So please follow the process on YOUR OWN RISK!

Custom visuals are awesome. It’s easy to import them to Power BI Desktop model and start using them. But, what if you decide to remove them from your model? Is there a way to disable an imported custom visual?

Well, the answer is No and Yes! I mean, NO, there is no specific setting or option you can manage imported custom visuals in Power BI Desktop. But, YES, there is a way you can get rid of an existing custom visual. In this article I show you how to do the job.

First of all, I’d like to inform you that Microsoft will add the feature to disable custom visuals in Power BI Desktop, but, until then you can follow the my trick to completely disable/remove a custom visual from your Power BI Desktop model.

As you might already know a PBIX file is a compressed file indeed, so you can open it with a ZIP editor software like 7-Zip.

Requirements:

  • Download and install 7-Zip. It’s a free open source file archiver/compressor
  • Download and install Notepad++ which is also free and open source. It’s an awesome text editor

Removing/disabling Custom Visual

  • Open you Power BI Desktop model (PBIX file) containing a custom visual
  • As you see you need to enable custom visuals, click “Enable custom visuals”
Enable Custom Vizuals
  • I used “KPIStatusWithHistory” custom visual in my sample model
Custom Vizuals
Continue reading “How to Disable Custom Visual in Power BI Desktop Model” →
Power BI

Power BI Publisher for Excel

Publish Excel to Power BI

Update: Publish your Excel (M365) reports to Power BI Service

The Excel Pulisher to Power BI Service is not available as an add-in anymore. It is now a built-in feature within the Excel app itself.

You can now publish your Excel reports directly from the Excel itself into your Power BI Service. Follow the steps below:

1- Click File menu then click Publish
2- Click Publish to Power BI
3- Select a Workspace you’d like to publish the report from the dropdown
4- Click Upload

Publishing Excel reports to Power BI Service

After the report successfully published to your Power BI Service, a yellow message shows up in Excel. You can click the Go to Power BI button.

Go to Power BI after Publishing Excel reports to Power BI from Excel

5- From your Power BI Service, click to open the published Excel report in Power BI Service

Opening a Published Excel report in Power BI Service

6- Select a chart
7- Click Pin
8- Select an Existing dashboard or New dashboard
9- Click Pin

Pinning a chart from an Excel report to Power BI Dashboard

All Done! If you navigate to your Power BI Dashboard, the pinned charts must appear on the dashboard.

Pinned charts in Power BI DashboardIf you’re using the older versions of Excel then continue reading.

It’s been awhile that lots of Excel users were wondering if there is a way to include their Excel elements into Power BI dashboards. With Power BI Publisher for Excel you’re now able to publish snapshots on your important PivotTables, Charts, cell ranges etc. to your Power BI Dashboards. In this post you’ll learn how to get the job done.

How does Power BI Publisher for Excel works?

With the Power BI Publisher Excel you take snapshots of your important insights in Excel and Pin them in Power BI Dashboards.

You need to download and install the Power BI Publisher for Excel from here.

What Excel elements you can/cannot pin?

You can pin almost everything in your Excel worksheet including:

  • A range of cells (from a simple sheet, from a table or a pivot table)
  • Pivot charts
  • Illustrations and images
  • Text

However, you cannot pin 3D Maps or visualisations from Power View.

Note: Although you can pin almost everything from your worksheet to a Power BI Dashboard it doesn’t make sense to pin some elements like Slicers or Timeline filters.

Enabling Power BI Publisher for Excel

The Power BI Publisher for Excel add-in should be enabled by default, however, if for some reason it is not enabled you can manually enable it as below:

Power BI Publisher for Excel 01
Continue reading “Power BI Publisher for Excel” →
Power BI, Power BI Service, SQL Server Reporting Services - SSRS

SSRS 2016 and Power BI

SSRS 2016 and Power BI

Without a doubt SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is one of the most powerful reporting tools for several years. There are tons of features that you can use to make a report that suits your customers’ needs. Despite programmability and extensibility are key strengths of Reporting Services platform when it comes to creating dashboards, SSRS has absolutely nothing to offer as SSRS is a report authoring tool. So it never supposed to offer dashboards. In old days we could create web parts in SharePoint or we could install Performance Point and include SSRS reports in Performance Point dashboards. But, setting up and implementing dashboards in SharePoint/Performance Point was always a painful job. Happily with the new version of SQL Server 2016 we are able to pin visuals from existing on-prem SSRS reports to a Power BI dashboard. In this article I explain how SSRS 2016 and Power BI integration works.

Requirements

When you meet the above requirements you can pin visuals from existing SSRS reports to Power BI or you can create brand new reports and pin the visuals to Power BI.

Note: You can only pin report visuals to Power BI that means you won’t be able to pin tables and matrix to Power BI.

Note: If you don’t want to install the developer edition of SQL Server 2016 OR for any reason you cannot use the developer edition, don’t worry, the functionality I’m going to explain is available in other editions of SQL Server 2016. Indeed, the only editions that doesn’t support SSRS integration with Power BI are “Express Edition” and ” Express with Tools” editions. Check this out for more information.

Register SSRS with Power BI

After installing SQL Server you need to configure Reporting Services. As configuring Reporting Services is out of scope I leave it to you.

Note: At the time of writing this article I was using SQL Server 2016 CTP3. The same principles apply to SQL Server 2016.

  • Open “Reporting Services Configuration Manager”
  • Enter the “Server Name” and “Reporting Services Instance” then click “Connect”

SSRS 2016 Continue reading “SSRS 2016 and Power BI” →