Power-Bi

I saw the above message when working with one of my clients today. The error says Only users with Power BI Pro licenses can publish to this workspace. And that would make sense if they hadn’t already purchases Power BI Pro licenses for the user. I checked online, and there were a number of comments about people seeing this error. There were the usual suggestions of logging out and back into Power BI.

2020-09-07

Power BI is amazing. And it’s starting to appear all over the place. Many enterprises don’t know what to make of it though. Some are scared that it’ll be the “next Access” where stores of uncontrolled data end up all over the organization. Power BI’s mantra of “5 minutes to Wow” is spot on. It’s easy to be impressed. But enterprises are often struggling with “what comes next after that 5 minutes?

2020-08-07

I was editing using the Power Query editor in an Analysis Services project, hosted in Visual Studio 2019. When I tried to use “Add column by example”, I received the error shown above: Unexpected Error Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.DataIntegration.TransformDataByExample, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad34e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. The problem is that the assembly had not been deployed with the Analysis Services Designer.

2020-07-16

If you’ve done much work with Power BI, you’ll know that relative dates can be really useful. But if you’ve tried to use them, you’d also know that they aren’t as useful as they might at first seem. You configure them in Power BI Desktop and they look great. You deploy them to the Power BI Service, and you have a problem. Why? Because Power BI Desktop uses your local timezone and the Power BI Service doesn’t.

2020-03-27

I was working with a client the other day and we had what we thought was a simple situation: A table in an SSAS tabular model project The table had two partitions We needed to remove 6 columns from the table So, we’d already removed the 6 columns from the SQL Server view that the tables were being loaded from. We just needed to update the tabular model. Now for an unpartitioned table, that’s easy.

2020-02-14

I’ll start this post by mentioning that there’s a general consensus that you should avoid columns in tabular data models that have both dates and times. That’s largely because they don’t compress well. However, sometimes you really do need to have both a date and a time in a single column. For example, if you want to sort one column by the date and time, we have no option to sort one column by two other columns.

2020-01-31

I have a client who’s publishing their tabular data models to Azure Analysis Services (AAS). They want to publish a table that’s visible, but only has a single column that’s hidden. You might wonder why he wanted to do that. He’s trying to have a table with no existing columns that’s an anchor point for report designers to attach their report-specific measures. There are measures and computed columns in the tabular data model in AAS.

2020-01-24

In a recent consulting project, I needed to plot analytic values over postcodes. I couldn’t just do it with the built-in maps control, mostly because the system that we’re developing on doesn’t have Internet connectivity. I was keen to upload the mapping data directly into the report, and the Shape Map control (while still in preview) seemed to fit what I needed exactly. However, when you load custom maps into the control, they need to be in TopoJSON format.

2019-11-05

Over the last few months, one of my Kiwi buddies (and fellow member of both the MVP and Microsoft Regional Director programs) Reza Rad has been organizing a bunch of us to write a book that’s a collection of ideas from a number of MVPs. It’s the Power BI MVP Book. There are a whole lot of authors from a whole lot of different countries: Reza Rad, Anil Maharjan, Indira Bandari, Liam Bastick, Ken Puls, Jesus Gil, Thomas LeBlanc, Ike Ellis, Matt Allington, Leila Etaati, Markus Ehrenmüller, Ashraf Ghonaim, Eduardo Castro, Manohar Punna, Treb Gatte, Gilbert Quevauvilliers, Michael Johnson, Shree Khanal, Asgeir Gunnarsson, Greg Low, Gogula Aryalingam.

2019-08-16

Three years back, with much fanfare at a partner conference, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Professional Degree program. It was going to be a set of courses that you could take that would lead to one of their professional degrees. Now here in Australia, you can’t just call something a degree, and I’m guessing that’s the same in the USA, so I wasn’t surprised when I noticed soon after I started with it, that the name had changed to the Microsoft Professional Program (MPP), and they’d dropped the “degree” word.

2019-07-23