If you want to format a measure as date in Power BI, you need an expression returning a date/time data type. This is different from what you can do in Power Pivot and in SSAS Tabular, where you can format any numeric expression using a date and/or time format, and the conversion is implicitly done to perform such a visualization. The problem ...

Last week, a new version of DAX Studio (2.5.0) has been released. You can find a summary of the new features in the blog post from Darren Gosbell - thanks Darren for your wonderful job with this tool! My small contribution to this tool is mainly in the area of performance analysis. In the last few months, I worked on implementing a support for ...

One week ago I delivered a session for 24 hour of PASS, the online free event delivered by PASS (recordings are now available), where I introduced my one-day preconference Create a Power BI Solution in one day that I will deliver at PASS Summit 2016 in Seattle on October 25, 2016. As usual, there were too many questions and not enough time, so I ...

A recent change in the DAX language transformed the behavior of IF statement, so that it should not return BLANK but only TRUE/FALSE if the results should be logical expressions. In that case, the BLANK is transformed in a FALSE condition. For example, consider that the result of the following expression is FALSE and not BLANK: IF ( 1 = 1, ...

The summer is almost over and while we are working on new content (books and other for www.sqlbi.com), I already have the plans for this Autumn’s conferences. Microsoft Ignite 2016 – September 26-30, Atlanta, GA See what’s new in SQL Server Analysis Services 2016 Tabular Models Review DirectQuery in SSAS 2016, best practices and ...

In the last few days, users of the Synoptic Panel and Smart Filter (custom visuals for Power BI) experienced some issue in the behavior of these components. Changes applied to API and automatic updates pushed through the Microsoft Power BI Gallery created some unexpected problems. Now the components are synchronized on www.okviz.com and the Power ...

If you are used to virtual relationships in DAX (see Handling Different Granularities in DAX), you probably use the following pattern relatively often: [Filtered Measure] := CALCULATE (     <target_measure>,     FILTER (         ALL ( ...

Power BI has been on the market one year. My biggest concern, when the product was still in private beta, was the promise of monthly releases made by Microsoft. Today, I can say that the promise was real. I see a long road ahead, in terms of features and possible improvements. But it’s a matter of fact that Power BI is a product with a growing ...

Microsoft Press released a free eBook you can already download, Introducing Microsoft Power BI, which I and Alberto Ferrari wrote in the last few months. Please note it is a very introductive book, don’t expect an inside-out. As we wrote in the introduction: We wanted to write an introduction to Power BI that covers the basics of ...

One of my favourite things about Power BI is its extensibility. For ages I would hear about how good some other self-service reporting platforms were, and how things in the Microsoft space were lacking. Power View, in particular, was frustratingly limited in what you could do with it, and I felt somewhat disappointed. It was good as a data ...