The capitalization (uppercase / lowercase) of my text data changed in Power BI! Why?
November 29, 2021Some of you might have seen this before – you load some data into Power BI and suddenly the capitalization (uppercase / lowercase) of your text changes on you. Let me explain what is happening here. Why this happens The reason for this is simple: The Analysis Services engine that underpins Power BI is case-insensitive (no, there is no way for you to change that). Also, the engine uses compression techniques to handle the massive amounts of data it can handle. Those two things combined result in this behavior. Here’s the details on what the engine does: When loading the…
Visualizing Home Assistant data in Power BI
Ahhh, Power BI and Home Assistant. Two of my favorite tools. So, why not try to bring them together? I like the Home Assistant data visualizations, but they are limited - that's where Power BI can really…
Making your own ‘smart’ garage door controller
I have two garage doors, both of which can have motors and can be opened automatically from my car, using a remote or a press off a button. Very convienient. However, sometimes I want to check if…
Updated: Annual Radio Countdown Top 2000 in Power BI
Here we are again – trying to continue the tradition of updating my Power BI analysis of the Dutch Radio 2’s Top 2000. This year however, the report was fully redesigned by my friend Marc Lelijveld after…
Never forget to water the plants again: building a DIY automatic plant watering / irrigation system for <$5
One thing we never seem to get right is when to water plants. We either overfeed them or forget them. In either case, they die quickly. As part of my many home automation endeavors I wanted to…
Power BI Pro Tip: show 0 instead of (Blank)
Default behavior of Power BI is to show (Blank) even when summing a numerical column that happens to be all empty. Want to show 0 instead? COALESCE helps.
Azure SQL firewall settings for Power BI refresh
I do not claim that what is included in this post is the perfect way of doing things. However, some things related to Azure SQL firewall settings for Power BI data refresh caught me by surprise recently…
Fixing ‘subscription is not registered with NRP’ error in Azure
Today I hit the following error while trying to write a PowerShell script to automate some Azure Networking related tasks (more on that soon!): 'Subscription [subscriptionID] is not registered with NRP'. In this short post I will…
Working with aggregations in Power BI Desktop
Aggregations bring me back to the good old SSAS days.You can imagine that I was curious but skeptical when I tried aggregations in Power BI Desktop.
Updated: Annual radio countdown Top 2000 in Power BI
A bit later this year, but even after my move to the US I decided to keep up the tradition of updating my Power BI analysis of the Top 2000 analysis for this year. Read all about…
Stepping back into the ring.
I am happy to share with you all that I am stepping back into the ring. After a ‘brief’ period (“It has been 6 months, how can you call that brief?”) I am back. And better than…
Data Nerdiness
