MVP Global Summit 2023 here we come!

Hey there, fellow Power BI, Power Platform and tech enthusiasts! 

I'm excited to share with you that I'll be attending the MVP summit on April 18-20 for the first time in-person as an MVP. It's been a long time since there was an in-person MVP Summit, so I'm looking forward to the experience!

For those of you who may not be familiar with the MVP program, it stands for Most Valuable Professional. It's a program run by Microsoft, celebrating 30 years this year, that recognizes exceptional technical community leaders who share their passion, expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.

Being selected as an MVP is a great honor, and I'm humbled to be part of such a fantastic community. The MVP summit is an annual event where MVPs from around the world gather to meet with Microsoft product teams, provide feedback on upcoming products, and share ideas and best practices.

This year's summit will be a hybrid event, meaning that some attendees will be joining virtually, while others will be attending in person. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to attend in person and to meet with other MVPs and members of the (Power BI) product team face-to-face!

As a first-time attendee, I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but I'm eager to learn, network, and share my experiences with others. I'm also excited to hear from the product teams about what's coming next in the world of Microsoft products.

I also want to thank everyone supporting me in my journey, my family, readers of my blog, attendees at conferences and also my employer Powerdobs B.V..

Overall, I'm thrilled to be attending the MVP summit and grateful for the opportunity to connect with others in the tech community. I'll be sure to share my experiences with you all once the event is over, so stay tuned!

My Power Platform Summit Europe Recap

Last week the Power Platform Summit Europe was held in Amsterdam. I was there together with my colleagues Sander and Pim and next to the learning experience the conference gave me, it was really nice to join them!

Before starting my recap I’d like to point you to the following tool: Microsoft Office Lens, it’s available both on iOS and Android! In every session I was in there were always people taking pictures of the slides. I sometimes do it also, just because I want to make a note next to the slide or because it’s something in a demo I’d like to capture. But the point I’m trying to make here: do it with the Office Lens app, because then your pictures will look like this:

Pro tip for making pictures of the screen: please use the Microsoft Office Lens app, available on both iOS and Android! :-) #PowerPlatformSummit pic.twitter.com/zRvWwL3rNp

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) 27 maart 2019

The information/sessions that stood out the most for me:

Line Krogh talked about Brons, Silver and Gold Power BI report templates:

• Gold: created by BI team on a managed Tabular model
• Silver: not created by BI team on a managed Tabular model
• Brons: not created by BI team on non-certified data sources

The Art of Gathering Effective BI requirements by Mico Yuk

• An interactive session where she also shared her spreadsheet to be used in discussion with end-users

Nikhil Gakwaed showed us some nice improvements in the Power BI Service:

• Comments on dashboards
• Organizational branding for Power BI Home

Callum Green did a session where one part about data profiling was interesting in particular:

• Data profiling in M (Table.profile)
• He also did some tweaking afterwards to get the profiling on the column and value level

The Value of Self-serve BI in a Large Organisation by Rishi Sapra:

• What-if scenario builder, which he will explain in-depth at the virtual Power BI Days

Demo of splitting the report and the data model by Just Blindbaek:

• This will be even better when Shared and Certified datasets are available, hopefully later this month!

Power BI Performance by Kasper de Jonge, David Magar and Bhavik Merchant:

• Avoid Bi-Di crossfiltering: you will go to hell! (according to Alberto Ferrari)
• Instead turn crossfiltering on in DAX: CROSSFILTER(Dim, Fact, OneWay/Both)

• Use variables, especially with IF
• Don't use IFERROR
• Use DIVIDE
• Model Star-schema/Snowflake
• Filter on Dimensions

A great session on Aggregation Tables by Reza Rad:

• Import mode, Direct Query and Dual
• Use DaxStudio to analyse the queries send by DQ

At the end of day 2 we had a nice view of the entrance to the conference:

Nice ending of a great 2nd day at the #PowerPlatformSummit! So many good sessions today! Good meeting so many friends again and also making new ones who share the same love for #PowerBI pic.twitter.com/pzvLZPypcc

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) 28 maart 2019

In the morning I found some time to go running with Sander in the Amstel Parc just across the road from our hotel. Although it was very chilly, it was worth the early wake up!

Just came back from a 6K run with @SLKerstens, getting ready for the last day of #PowerPlatformSummit! pic.twitter.com/wWkkKr5zZz

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) 29 maart 2019

Let me know if you agree with me or if you think you liked other sessions more at the Summit.

My next post will be a recap of the Power BI User Day 2019 in Utrecht where I also gave a presentation together with Jeroen Schalken.

@NickyvV

Power Platform Summit Europe & Power BI UG

Power Platform Summit Europe

This year the Power Platform Summit Europe (formerly Data & BI Summit) will be held in Amsterdam in the RAI, on 27-29 March. They renamed it because the conference is focused on Power BI, Microsoft Flow and PowerApps.
I will again be attending this conference (you can read my blogs about last year about my announcement, the Day 1 keynote and the recap). While it is good to have dedicated time to learn from the sessions at the conference, I always find it very useful to get in touch and network with everybody there.
I hope I also get the time to get some blog posts out during the conference.

The tracks this year are Act, Administrator, Automate, Developer and Measure.

The mobile app for the conference is now also available (for Android and iOS), where you can:

• Build your personal schedule
• View session details and presentation materials
• See who else is coming to the conference
• Get updates or room changes
• Give feedback on the sessions

As last year, Microsoft added the Power Series to the conference, some of which I am very interested in. There will be over 15 hours of deep dive and hands on content. A few of the topics covered in the Power Series are:

• Data Flows
• Power BI Admin & Performance Tuning Deep Dive
• Power BI Embedded Deep Dive
• Debugging DAX and Model performance issues
• AI in the Power BI Service

Power BI User Group Day 2019

Immediately after the Power BI User Group Day 2019 will be held on Saturday March 30 in Utrecht, where my colleague Jeroen and me will be presenting about our journey of implementing Power BI (Premium) at Van Lanschot Kempen!
I assume a lot of the speakers and attendees of the Summit will also attend this UG. The keynote will for example be provided by Charles Sterling.
I think it will be a great week and it will be good to catch up with friends and make new connections in the community.
If you’re also going to one of the above events, let me know in the comments or on Twitter, I hope to see you there!
@NickyvV

My Data & BI Summit Recap

I finally came around to writing a wrap-up for the Data & BI Summit in Dublin last month.
No fancy pictures or colors, just a to-the-point summary.

New features

• Incremental refresh – Premium (included in May update as preview feature)
• Drillthrough with current filters and parameters (included in May update)
• Common Data Service For Analytics (preview live)
• Theme file additions coming soon:
• Theme export
• Background added to themes
• Table/matrix headers
• Persistent filters (per user) in the service
• Buttons to trigger action (included in May update)
• Q&A and linguistics
• App workspaces without Office365 group

Modelling

• Optimize your model (size)
• Make use of Query folding in Power Query
• Applies to Import mode only
• Filter first, Transform later
• Use supported transformations first, non-folding steps at the end
• Writing a SQL query in Get Data prevents folding
• Create a blank query with #shared to show a document library of all M functions (Blog)

Visualization

• Choose a theme
• Report theme generator at PowerBI.tips
• Color Theme Creator at Aka.ms/pbitheme
• Outlining
• Canva.com
• PowerPoint
• PowerBI.tips
• Storytelling, with:
• Custom visuals (e.g. Timeline Storyteller)
• Bookmarks
• Tooltip pages
• PowerApps visual
• Drillthrough
• Syncing slicers

Governance

• Use App Workspaces for DTAP
• DEV_Finance
• UAT_Finance
• Finance
• Use Onedrive for Business for versioning your pbix-files, with the same folders as the App Workspace
• Use the API’s with PowerShell to copy resources between workspaces
• Chriss Webb (@cwebb_bi) wrote a successful script in response to a video from Adam Saxton (@GuyInACube)

Best practices and notes

Visualization | Model

• Driving table for measures
• Hide unused columns
• Totals in matrix and tables insensitive to row filters
• Uniform naming of measures and calculations
• Sync slicers
• Add descriptions where possible
• Make sure filters are not hardcoded

Governance

• Add an about page with last refresh date time and description of Model
• Version the Model
• Schedule datasets using Admin account for one place to monitor failure notification emails
• Use one drive as source control
• Golden dataset

Further reading

• Power BI Whitepapers
• PowerBI.tips
• Power BI User Voice

@NickyvV

In Action: Technical Preview of Power BI Reports in SSRS

Yesterday the SSRS team made the announcement that we can now consume Power BI reports inside Reporting Services. You can upload your Power BI files (.pbix) to the Report Manager, or deploy them to the Report Server from Power BI Desktop if you like.
To start off, I really like the features and the things you can do, however I also found some issues I will be talking about later.

How to get started

The SSRS team did a pretty good job describing How to get started with the Technical Preview, so I won't repeat that here, just read their blog.
A few caveats:

Seriously Microsoft #Azure, this error message is not helping. pic.twitter.com/wCFsSmZW2h

— Koen Verbeeck (@Ko_Ver) October 27, 2016

• Your virtual machine name in Azure needs to be all lowercase letters, in Chrome the error message displays correctly, but in IE the error message you receive is not very helpful, according to Koen.
• I used West Europe as my Azure Region, so I had to login to the RDP as WESTEUROPE\nvvroenhoven

After having gone through the setup of your Azure VM you'll have to wait 10-20 minutes for your VM to be provisioned and you're good to go.

What does it look like?

After logging in to your VM you can open the report manager via the SSRS Preview shortcut on the desktop and you end up with an overview of the available KPI's, Mobile reports and Power BI Desktop Reports available on the server:

Open a Power BI Desktop report

Clicking on one of the PBI Desktop Reports gives you the Power BI report (which was created with 1 page) in the report manager interface:

Edit a Power BI Report

You can edit the reports in Power BI Desktop by clicking on the 3 dots in the upper right corner of the report tile in the web portal and clicking "Edit in PowerBI Desktop". By the way, I believe there's a space missing between Power and BI :-).

When you open the report in PBI Desktop you also get a pop-up saying they're busy opening your report, the links in that pop-up are still on the ToDo list I guess because they are pointing to https://go.microsoft.com/TODO :-)

SSAS Live connection

As stated in an earlier announcement by the SSRS team: "This preview supports Power BI reports that connect "live" to Analysis Services models – both Tabular and Multidimensional (cubes). We plan to extend support to additional data sources in a future preview." You can see this by looking at the Data Source settings and in the lower right corner of the report in PBI Desktop. As a consequence of connecting live to SSAS you are not able to edit the data model or adjust any queries.

Saving a PBI Desktop file to SSRS

When you save the file you have the option of saving it to disk or directly to SSRS.

When you choose the option of SSRS make sure to type in http://localhost/reports instead of https for this VM.

If you've already saved it once to SSRS and click save (or CTRL+S) afterwards in PBI Desktop, it keeps this setting and saves it automatically to SSRS.

Manage a Power BI Report

You can also manage the report item with the following properties:

Manage Data sources

For now, only live connections to SSAS are supported, but that will certainly change in the future. You can also use credentials to connect to the SSAS instance, but for now I'll use the default settings. 

At my first attempt to test the connection I got an error message, the next attempts did work correctly, no idea why that happened.

Manage Security

You can also customize the security for a specific report, before doing so you get a confirmation dialog box to confirm your settings differing from the parent folder:

After I clicked Customize security, but didn't alter anything, I started to run into some issues I'll describe here.

Issues with the Technical Preview (released October 27th)

Test connection

I encountered this error when I tried to test the connection to the SSAS Tabular cube. The second attempt did work correctly. I made no changes to the settings, I only clicked around a bit.

Customize security

After clicking the button "Customize security" I tried opening the report (I renamed the report to Sample Sales Report 2) again but the Power BI logo kept displaying.

Opening the report in PBI Desktop also didn't work and resulted in the following error:

Also when I open the .pbix-file from explorer and try to save it to SSRS I get the following error:

Any of the other reports (where I didn't alter the security settings) opens and saves perfectly fine. So in my opinion these errors all relate to the same issue with the security settings.

After undoing the security changes, so clicking on "Use same security as parent folder" everything was working fine again.

Conclusion

All in all some great new features have been added! I bumped into some minor issues that I'm sure will be resolved in later versions.

The Best of PASS Summit 2015

If you haven’t been to the PASS Summit in Seattle last year (like me :(), you might want to check out the recordings of Summit 2015, as they are now available on PASStv.

Furthermore, PASS has selected the top 10 recordings (I believe based on reviews of the sessions) for you to look at over at Youtube. The links to the video’s can be found at the PASS website, go check them out!


My personal favourite is from Itzik Ben-Gan:

Have fun!