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At a customer site, I developed some Power BI dataflows and datasets that connect to Azure Storage. Recently, we decided to secure the storage accounts using the built-in IP Address and Virtual Network options. It was a little challenging to get the Power BI Service to connect to the storage, so this blog is going to run you through the options & hopefully save you time, and money. Up front, there are a lot of things I won't be covering as we'd be here all day. So Private En

I've blogged twice (here and here) about authentication using the msal Python module. I'm going to cap off this topic with a third and final entry by moving onto the azure-identity module. When I first looked at Azure authentication for the Power BI REST API, I honestly kind of fell into using the msal library first. I found it easy to use and went on to blog about it. Recently, I needed to use the azure-identity module took the time to try it out for getting access tokens to

This week the Power BI team announced an awesome new feature. It's the ability to run DAX queries against your Power BI datasets via a...

Back in November 2020 I blogged about using the Python MSAL library to authenticate to Power BI and call the REST APIs. In that blog I...

Datalineo are seeking a Senior Power BI Consultant to join the growing team. The ideal candidate is a Microsoft data platform expert with proven skills in data warehousing and solid Power BI knowledge. Take a look at the job spec and if this sounds like an opportunity for you, then don't hesitate to get in touch! Click here for the job spec and details on how to apply: https://www.datalineo.com/jobs

In February 2021 at the Scottish Summit, I spoke about Dataflows & Shared Datasets and how you can evolve your Power BI architecture using these two super cool features. The session was recorded and uploaded to YouTube, so I thought I'd share it here too. Enjoy!

The ability to load data from Parquet files into Power BI is a relatively new thing and given it's storage structure, I wanted to see how Power Query dealt with it, and whether it gave any improvements over the more common format of CSV. This is a pound-for-pound Import-mode comparison between the two file types, covering the reading of the file and processing in the Power BI Data model. Early admission, some of the results I've shared below are not strictly related to CSV vs

Recently I built a dashboard for a client that sourced data from a large and varied number of data sources. It helped monitor a wide array of functions in a manufacturing plant with metrics to drive the audience to action where necessary. Given the varied nature of both data sources and their refresh rates, I wanted to provide easy-to-consume documentation without having to make everyone read pages & pages of wordy explanations. The result was a metric-by-metric diagram that

In the Business Intelligence world, there is consensus among some that Pie Charts have no place on a report. There's even a Twitter hashtag: #SayNoToPieCharts. I'm here to offer my defence of this visual, and by the end of this article, if you haven't reconsidered your stance I will gladly eat humble pie chart. Without going too deeply on this subject, data visualisations are intended to invoke visual queues for us to spot a trend, comparison or outlier to direct our eyes to

As this unforgettable year comes to a close, I wanted to share a summary of the Datalineo journey over the last twelve months. It goes without saying that it was a year of challenges globally, from business, employee and indeed from family perspectives. How did Datalineo go this year? Let’s a take a look… As a business we were (very very thankfully!) positively impacted via the COVID-19 pandemic. However, 2019 and 2020 look like two different businesses. For us it was a shift

I had a requirement to clean out all data in a field except for the numbers. This was a plain text field where users would manually enter data and within the text was an order number. For example, from the below I just want 51638, the rest is discarded. The data I got was never entered consistently (humans, am I right?) so using any kind of pattern to obtain the order number was not possible. The below shows an example of the data, and the result I want. Power Query has a won

When you perform a Distinct operation in Power Query, the elimination policy is to keep the first instance it sees of the column(s) you have nominated, then discard any subsequent matching rows. There are occasions when you may want to be more selective in choosing which row you keep. For example, the below shows a list of Products with a Part Number, Description & Last Sold Date. As you can see, the description has changed over time, so I want my result set to reflect the cu

I have several customers using Dynamics CRM and have built Power BI solutions using these as a data source. Dynamics CRM uses the Common Data Service, now known as Microsoft Dataverse, as it's storage layer and being able to search or browse objects in there has been a challenge if you don't have access to the Dynamics/Power Apps admin portal. The solution I am sharing below is going to be redundant in about 20 minutes as the evolution of the data platform, encompassing Datav

Update Sep 2021. Great to see you here! I suggest after you read read this blog, don't miss the other two additions to the series, where...

Using Power BI themes has allowed me to keep look and feel consistent. This is important to me as I put a lot of time and effort into...

Using the new Microsoft Teams feature to track attendees leaving & joining your meeting.

Ever found it hard to keep up with all of the Meetup.com events you are interested in? Same here. So as a Power BI person I thought I'd try & collate all of the Meetup's I know and produce a much easier view of what's events are coming & have some level of interaction with the report. I have shared all of the code in a pbix file, which you can get down the bottom of this page. Here's the finished product: Getting access to the data was not the easiest. Each Meetup has a calen

We have been shortlisted for the Start-Up Award as part of the 2019 Sandyford Business District Awards.