Master Data Services 2014 Add-in for Excel published
Just a bit over a week ago a new version of the Master Data Services Add-in for Excel was released. It is the 2014 release, which will also work for SQL Server 2012. Main benefit is up to 4x…
Power BI Pro Tip: Dealing with errors when reading Excel files
If you use Power Query to read an Excel file that has errors (such as #VALUE, #REF, #N/A, etc) the rows that contain the error will not be loaded into the data model but instead will be…
Combining text (csv) files using Power Query – follow-up
I have been getting quite a few responses on my original post on how to combine text (csv) files using Power Query. One of the FAQs is how to keep the filename where the data came from…
Power BI Pro Tip: Name your linked tables
Just a quick Power BI Pro Tip this time: if you use linked tables to add data to your data model in Excel, before you press the ‘Add To Data Model’ button be sure to go to…
Power BI Pro Tip: Show Top x results with RANKX() function
One of the more frequent scenarios is listing the top X results, such as most profitable products, biggest customers, top 10 best selling stores, etc. Also doing a top X selection helps reduce clutter in charts: a…
Version compatibility between Power Pivot Data Models in Excel 2010 / 2013 and SharePoint 2010 / 2013
I have been getting a lot of questions on compatibility around Excel 2010 / Excel 2013 / SharePoint 2010 / SharePoint 2013. To be honest, I have been confused myself. I encourage you to check out our Excel…
Power BI Pro Tip: Role playing dimensions with UseRelationship
One frequent need in BI is something called a role playing dimension (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_(data_warehouse)#Role-playing_dimension for a definition). The classic example of this is a Date dimension that is related to a Sales fact table and used either…
Power BI Pro Tip: Sort By Column
Here is an easy solution to a very common problem when making reports: how do I change the sort of some items from alphabetically to something else? The most apparent sample of this is Months. Let’s say…
CEO Announcement Twitter Analysis
Last week Satya Nadella was announced as the new CEO of Microsoft (see http://www.microsoft.com/ceo). This was met with a lot of reaction in the world and also on the social networks. I decided to analyze the tweets…
Top 3 of what is new in Power Query for Excel
Just recently the December update of Power Query for Excel has been published. See this blog post on the Power BI for the details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2013/12/13/one-step-closer-to-simplifying-data-analysis-and-visualization-new-features-added-to-power-bi-for-office-365-and-power-query-add-in-for-excel-preview.aspx. In this post I want to give you my personal top 3:…
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