Power BI Weekly

Issue #99 - 2nd March 2021

This week there's been an influx of announcemnets. Probably the most sought after being the Power BI February 2021 Feature Summary - the first Power BI feature summary this year! The updates include a new Search Bar in Desktop, new connectors, new visuals and many other updates. Announced separately was the General Availability (GA) of the Power BI connector for Databricks, which includes AAD auth and SSO in DirectQuery mode, and the public preview of Object-Level Security in Power BI - a great new feature to give you finer-grained control over your data models in Power BI. Also shared this week:

Elsewhere this week, Alberto Ferrari has written a comprehensive couple of blogs, helping us understand Circular Dependencies in DAX and how to avoid circular dependencies. Patrick Leblanc has spoken about Why Power BI loves a Star Schema, talking us through the guidance written on the Microsoft docs with some practical examples. Finally, Ruth Pozuelo Martinez has described a simple way to filter a table to show only most recent date by group in Power Query - a useful trick for slowly changing dimensions whereby only the latest record for each group is required.

🛠️ Data Prep

On the Power BI blog, Kay Unkroth announces General Availability (GA) of the Power BI connector for Databricks
On the RADACAD YouTube channel, Reza Rad (@Rad_Reza) describes Power BI Quick Tip: the Formula Bar in Power Query and shares the recording: Accessing API and web service data using Power Query - by Chris Webb
On the Power BI Community blog, Steve de Peijper shares some Power M code to read Netatmo API data, on the Power BI community blog, describes how to Dynamically Detect Column Types with Power M and explains how to Generate sample data
Krešimir Ledinski (@Exceed_ltd) describes How to process multiple folders with a single PowerQuery script
On the MSSQLTips site, Kenneth A. Omorodion explains how to Create Calendar Table Using Power Query M Language
Patrick Leblanc (@GuyInACube) shares the INSANE AMAZING Power Query tip to quickly change data sources in Power BI and Excel
Gilbert Quevauvilliers (@GilbertQue) writes about Power Query – Continuous Week on Week Comparison
Ruth Pozuelo Martinez (@CurbalEN) describes How to filter a table to show only most recent date by group in Power Query
Jarret Moore walks through Addressing Irregular Data Formats - Problem Of The Week #6 (Power Query Solution)
Andy Cutler (@MrAndyCutler) shares the Data Saturdays Pordenone Session: Harnessing Azure Synapse Analytics Serverless SQL Pools in Power BI Dataflows.

🧩 Data Modeling

On the SQLBI blog, Alberto Ferrari (@FerrariAlberto) describes Understanding Circular Dependencies in DAX and covers Avoiding circular dependency errors in DAX
Ilya Rzhevskiy (@ilya_sb1) talks about Formatting Calculated Items of Calculated Groups in Tabular Editor
Ruth Pozuelo Martinez (@CurbalEN) presents DAX Fridays! #199: Using curly brackets in DAX expressions?
On the Power BI community blog, Steve de Peijper shares DAX & Power BI file to calculate and display the Area of a Polygon. and describes how to Use Dynamic SVG for Debugging or Teaching DAX
On the Tessellation Tech blog, Spencer Baucke (@JSBaucke) walks through Creating a Measures Table in Power BI
Bas Dohmen (@HowToPowerBI) discusses Variables in Power BI
Reid Havens (@HavensBI) writes about an Easy Technique for Improving DAX Measure Testing and discusses Creating External Tools for Power BI with Marc Lelijveld
Hima Bindu Marri (@sivahimabindu) explains how to Calculate Running Totals in Power BI using DAX
Sam McKay (@_EnterpriseDNA) talks about This Year VS Last Year Time Comparisons & Differences In Power BI
Mudassir Syed Rashid Ali explains how to Avoid Unpivoting Columns With Calculation Groups - DAX Tutorial
On the CSG Pro blog, Mark Beedle (@markbdi) describes How to Build a Star Schema Data Model
Patrick Leblanc (@GuyInACube) describes Why Power BI loves a Star Schema
Sam Fischer provides Top 5 tips to reduce your Power BI data model size
Parv Chana (@parvchana) writes about Comparing Selected Client With Other Top N Clients
The Azure updates team highlights that Earlier versions of Analysis Services client libraries will retire on 30 June 2021

📊 Report Authoring and Interactivity

On the Power BI blog, Will Thompson (@Will_MI77) blogs about What's new with ArcGIS for Power BI
Parker Stevens (@PowerBIElite) describes how to Dynamically Highlight Line Chart Series in Power BI
On the Power BI community blog, Amit Chandak (@amitchandak78) describes Conditional formatting the Pie Visual
On the Data Bear blog, Mariska Oosthuizen covers Combo charts in Power BI
David Eldersveld (@dataveld) talks about Looking Beyond Tables in Power BI
On the Enhansoft blog, Leonard Suares (@SuaresLeonard) writes about Slicer and Filter Conflict
On the Purple Frog Systems blog, Joe Billingham discusses Power BI Drill Through using Multiple Data Points
On the SQL Shack blog, Ben Richardson discusses Working with Power BI report themes
On the Excel Basement YouTube channel, Rahim Zulfiqar Ali (@rahimzulfiqar) explains how to Add Trend Line to Scatter Chart
On the RADACAD YouTube channel, Reza Rad (@Rad_Reza) shares a Visualization Tip Change to Filter instead of highlight Control the Interaction in Power BI
Dhruvin Shah (@DhruvinShah16) explains how to Apply Gridlines and Background Color in Small Multiples and talks about the Search bar in Power BI Desktop
Sam McKay (@_EnterpriseDNA) describes Creating Multi-Threaded Visualizations Within Power BI Reports
Mara Pereira (@maraft_per) explains how to Edit your data directly from Power BI using PowerApps
Also on the Excel Basement YouTube channel, Rahim Zulfiqar Ali (@rahimzulfiqar) writes about Small Multiples in Power BI and talks about Clustering in Microsoft POWER BI - How To Cluster Your Data in Seconds
On the Power BI Community blog, Janey Guo describes how to Use conditional formatting to mark the same aggregated value in the same row in the matrix
Also on the Power BI community blog, Anand writes Easy As Insights — Part 1: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Insights Template

🚀 Deployment, Security and Operations

On the Power BI blog, Amit Shuster (@ShusterAmit) shares the Power BI Developer community February 2021 update
Also on the Power BI blog, Ogbemi Ekwejunor-Etchie announces the public preview of Object-Level Security in Power BI
Also on the Power BI blog, Arthi Ramasubramanian Iyer (@ArthiRamasubra1) highlights that the On-premises data gateway February 2021 update is now available
Philipp Lenz (@lenz_philipp) explains how to Orchestrate schedule refreshes in Power BI and describes how to Run an Azure Automation runbook with PowerShell to get data from the Power BI REST API
Brett Powell (@BrettPowell76) writes Common Power BI Admin Scripts Part 1
Just Blindbæk (@justblindbaek) discusses Extracting Power BI metadata with Data Factory (part 1)
Dhruvin Shah (@DhruvinShah16) describes how to Automatically Send Power BI Report as PDF or PPT format in Email
On the Power BI community blog, Nithya Mallapu writes about Access Database Refresh fails with Data source Undefined Error in Power BI Service and discusses OLE DB or ODBC error while connecting to Amazon Athena from Power BI Desktop using ODBC connector
On the CSG Pro blog, Rachel Dyer (@rachelrdyer) talks about Thinking Enterprise and Adoption with Power BI
Marcus Wegener (@PowerBIler) writes about Die Größe der Power BI-Vorlagen Datei optimieren [German]

🌐 General

On the Power BI blog, Jeroen ter Heerdt (@jeroenterheerdt) shares the Power BI February 2021 Feature Summary
On the BIFocal podcast, John White and Jason Himmelstein (@bifocalshow) share Episode 180 - Interview with Melissa Coates and share Episode 181 - Power BI February 2021 Feature Summary
The Knee-Deep in Tech team (@KneeDeepinTech) share Podcast episode 143
On the Power BI community blog, Priscilla Camp (@ITDataDiva) blogs about DA-100: Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI – Tips to help you succeed
On the Excel Basement YouTube channel, Rahim Zulfiqar Ali (@rahimzulfiqar) explains How to Prepare and Pass DA-100 Exam
Adam Saxton and Patrick Leblanc (@GuyInACube) present Power BI tips from the Pros – LIVE (Feb 27, 2021)
Kasper de Jonge (@kjonge) shares Kasper On BI on developing Power BI & life of a Microsoft PM with Kim Manis
Jayant Kumar Kodwani writes about Analyzing and Visualizing Sentiments from Unstructured data