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Jul 15

How To: Create the missing KPI Indicator In Power BI Desktop Using Conditional Formatting

Power BI lacks the ability to add KPI calculations when creating a data model in Power BI Desktop. I will show you how to get the same functionality by using the recently released feature “Conditional Formatting by a Different Field”. This will allow you to take a calculated score and have an Icon displayed for each row in your table.  A working Live Interactive Power BI Sample is attached at the bottom of this post.

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Jun 3

SSDT for Visual Studio 2017 – Fixing the Install Error

There is an odd error when trying to install SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), either as a stand-alone, or adding to an instance of Visual Studio 2017.  I had the same setup failure, no matter what configuration I was using. The following steps worked for me, and may for your situation.

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Jun 3

How to use Azure Data Factory V2 Sliding Windows for SQL Exports to Azure Data Lake

This article reviews the process of using Azure Data Factory V2 sliding windows triggers to archive fact data from SQL Azure DB. This process will automatically export records to Azure Data Lake into CSV files over a recurring period, providing a historical archive which will be available to various routines such as Azure Machine Learning, U-SQL Data Lake Analytics or other big data style workloads.

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Apr 29

How to use Data Driven Settings to Control Power BI Reports

It is easy to look at Power BI dashboards as static, but you can use some old school techniques to provide the ability the generate dynamic content using data-driven global settings that will be available to all your report developers. These techniques will allow your published reports to remain unchanged but allow the reports to dynamically reflect default information shown to the user, such as Current Month, Report Comments and even a time stamp of the last data source update.

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Apr 19

How to Publish Power BI Reports to a Public Web Site

An often overlooked, yet powerful feature of Power BI allows you to publish a report to a website using an embed code. This puts the report and underlying data out for everyone who has access to that web page. The sample page below shows a sample book I published for a training session. The following how-to will walk you through will the steps leverage this feature on your site.

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Apr 15

Power BI Logical Architecture 5MinuteBI

How to Architect Your Power BI Solution

The best place to start when learning to develop Power BI solutions is to review the logical architecture your Data Visualization projects will have. There are many moving parts and pieces to a Power BI solution, especially when looking at the varied data sources you can use. From on-premises to web-based, from public to confidential, you must make sure you expose your data securely. Having a good clear architecture will help you achieve a not only a good solution but also a secure one. The following article will show you how you can architect your own solution.

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Apr 9

How to Use and Refresh Power BI Using OneDrive Data Sources

One of the challenges for users with Power BI is being able to use a data source that you can update and flow those changes to your Power BI dashboards and reports. Using an Excel file in OneDrive for Business allows you to have multiple users update data, connect to a data source and schedule an automated refresh without having a lot of infrastructure. The following walkthrough will show you how you can leverage this feature for your own solution.

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Mar 24

Late Night Database Audits and eBay don’t Mix Or How Steve Jobs, Apple Engineers and $60 Reignited My Passion

So, I just unpacked my “new” Apple Macintosh Classic. My line I gave my family today is that “Lates nights, balancing databases and eBay don’t mix”. But as it sits there, I am finding an amazing flood of emotion and inspiration that has been missing of late, let me explain.

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Mar 11

Learning Resources to get you Started in Microsoft Azure Data Projects

As companies move data workloads to the cloud, more and more resources are available online to help you get up to speed. The following learning map provides a path to these online resources not only to give you an overview but also to provide an experience of these technologies .

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Feb 13

When is 22 true? – PowerBI DAX Search Within IF Statements

I needed to quickly create a calculation that tested for the presence of a string in another column's text values. There are two ways to solve this, but the first one is an interesting example that you can use in several situations.  This solution plays on the true-false values of the DAX IF function in PowerBI.

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