Paginated reports in Power BI offer a rich set of capabilities for printing, and the generation of report documents. Paginated reports can be exported to multiple document formats, and those exports can be scheduled and delivered via email. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, paginated reports require the use of ... read more
Power BI is without question the best way to report on data in SharePoint lists. The query tools available in Power Query make working with SharePoint data relatively painless, an the cached dataset means that reports are run against an optimized copy of the list data, not the data ... read more
Power BI Report Builder is Microsoft’s design tool for building Paginated reports in Power BI. It is based on Microsoft Report Builder (formerly SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder), but has been optimized for the Power BI service. One of the most important capabilities of Power BI Report ... read more
Power BI V2 workspaces recently (May 2019) entered into general availability. The biggest difference between a V1 and V2 Power BI workspace is the fact that a V2 workspace is not backed by an Office 365 group, and a V1 workspace is. One area that this change affects a great ... read more
Power BI datasets and dataflows are the two native data sources for Power BI reports. Connecting to a datasets allows a report to be built against an existing Power BI dataset in place, and dataflows represent a source of data that has had transformations applied to it. When connecting to ... read more
If you are new to Power BI, or if you’ve worked with Power BI Desktop, you’re familiar with the concept of refreshing data. By default, Power BI caches data which needs to be refreshed on a periodic basis. Reports that use Direct Query datasets do not need to have their ... read more
Microsoft Graph data connect (GDC) is a connector technology that allows an organization to extract data in bulk from the Microsoft Graph. Using Azure Data Factory, extraction jobs can be scheduled that can securely extract Graph data while respecting an organization’s data control policies. On a scheduled basis, GDC stages ... read more
At the end of 2018, SharePoint received something that we haven’t seen for a long time – a new column type, Location. Location columns will look up an address and geocode it as it is being entered in a form. It will also separate all the constituent parts of the address ... read more
Power BI dataflows are the first place that many users will encounter the new Power Query web based interface. Until now Power Query has been restricted to Power BI Desktop and Excel. This new web interface is, well, new, and it doesn’t contain all of the capabilities of the ... read more
Reporting on SharePoint data has been a requirement for a long time, and there have been many approaches to fulfill this need. Custom web parts, Data View web parts and SSRS direct connected reports have historically been some of the solutions, but they all suffer from the same problem. ... read more
The recent availability of the SharePoint 2019 public preview, and the supporting information that accompanies it has clarified the status of Business Intelligence features in SharePoint 2019. This release, with one exception, is the culmination of the process of decoupling BI from SharePoint which began in SharePoint 2016 through the ... read more
As discussed in a previous post, Working with Excel Files in the Power BI Service, Excel and Power BI have a rich, complex relationship. Power BI Desktop is the primary design tool for Power BI, and it has many feature overlaps with Excel as an analytic tool. Excel can be ... read more
Power BI has been able to work with Excel files since it was first introduced. Indeed, it was born from the analytic capabilities in Excel. Users can connect directly to Excel files by using the Power BI service and nothing but a browser. However, depending on the content of the ... read more