The BIccountant – New Generation Finance - Accounting - Controlling using Microsoft BI stack

Date.Networkdays function for Power Query and Power BI

Today I’m going to share my custom NETWORKDAYS function for Power Query with you that uses the same syntax than its Excel-equivalent.

NETWORKDAYS function

This function’s first 3 parameters work just like the Excel function and there is a 4th parameter that allows adjusting the day on which the week shall start:

Start as date
End as date
optional holidays as list of dates
optional number to change the start of the week from Monday (default: 1) to any other day (2 would mean that the week starts on Tuesday instead)

The function comes with a UI that lets you first choose a table containing the holidays and then choose the column with the holiday dates. Read more

Dynamic Benford’s Law measures in Power BI and Power Pivot

Benford’s Law compares the frequency distribution of leading digits to its (empirically proven) natural counterpart. This can then be used to detect fraud and errors.

Comparison between Benford distribution and actual

The green columns show how often each number should be the first digit in numbers that should follow the Benford-distribution. In black you’ll see the actual distribution of first digits within my table. Lastly, the red line shows the percentual absolute deviations between actual and Benford values.

In this example, there is a relatively high occurrence of numbers starting with 4 and 5. So this could be a sign for fraudulent manipulations.

The Benford Distribution

First you need a table with the Benford-distribution. Just load it as a disconnected table to your data model and name it “BenfordTable”. The “Value”-field from this table will be taken as x-axis for the visualisations. As the Benford-distribution is logarithmic, it can quickly be created with the following DAX-code:

Benford’s law Measure

The measure calculates how often a number starts with one of the BenfordNumbers (1..9) compared to the total number of rows in the FactTable.

If there are blank in the Value-column of the table to be analyzed, the measure has to be adjusted by filtering them out in the VAR CountTotal: ( CALCULATE(COUNTROWS(FactTable), FactTable[Value] <> BLANK()) )

Please note that you can create as many measures as you need in one model. So if you have multiple columns to investigate, just write a measure for each.

Benford’s law Variance Measure

To calculate the difference between target and actual, I use a MAXX-aggregation. This returns the maximum difference there is for a number. I also use this in a card visual if I want to add a data driven alert. So I don’t have to check and eyeball the chart regularly, but can just use this in a card visual in a dashboard. Then I’ll set a threshold value for the alert and will not miss any alarming developments.

Why DAX?

I’m using measures here instead of a calculated column (in the Benford-Table) because this allows me to filter and slice my table. This allows for making advanced and flexible analysis like comparing different values against each other or over time against the Benford distribution:

Benford’s Law Charts: Comparisons with various dimensions

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

Tidy up Power BI models with the Power BI Cleaner tool

The VertiPaq-Analyzer tool is one of the great community tools that I really cannot live without. It gives me a great overview of all elements in my model and identifies potential performance problems by showing the storage requirements of each column. So when seeing expensive columns, the first question that arises is: “Do I really need this column or could I delete it?”. Luckily, this can now be answered with my new Power BI Cleaner tool. This tool shows the usage of all columns (and measures) within the tables of the VertiPaq Analyzer.

Power BI Cleaner shows unused columns in the VertiPaq-tables

Power BI Cleaner tool

So whenever there is no entry in the column “Where Used” you can go ahead and eliminate the column (or measure) from the model. Well – with one exception actually: Fields used in the definition of incremental load policies are currently not identified. So make sure to consider this before running wild 😉 Read more

Advanced transformations on multiple columns at once in Power BI and Power Query

You can apply simple transformations to multiple columns at once in Power Query using the UI only. In this article I show how you can apply advanced transformations on multiple columns at once instead. You can also use this to use custom functions instead. And lastly for the ~~lazy~~efficient fans of custom M-functions: You will get a new “TranformAllMyColumnsAtOnceHowILikeIt”-function as well 😉

Background

The Transform-tab in the query editor is sensitive to the columns you select. So if you select multiple number columns for example, some number transformations will be greyed out and are therefore not accessible:

Some symbols are greyed out

So how could I then multiply all my columns by 10 for example, as the symbol for multiplication is greyed out? Read more

Dynamically create types from text with Type.FromText in Power Query and Power BI

In this article I’ll show you how to create types from text in Power Query, enabling you to dynamically change types via functions for example. It’ll come out as a custom Type.FromText function which has been asked for in the comments of this article: https://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/01/09/dynamic-bulk-type-transformation-in-power-query-power-bi-and-m.

Problem

To transform a column to type text can be done like so:

Table.TransformColumnTypes(Source,{{"Column1", type text}})

This transforms the “Column1” from table “Source” to type text. Now, if you want to make the type dynamic and move it to a function parameter like so:

(VariableType as type) =>

Table.TransformColumnTypes(Source,{{"Column1", VariableType}})

This returns a function dialogue as follows:

Performance tip for aggregations after joins in Power Query and Power BI

This article was edited on 2nd Nov 2019. JoinKind.Local has been removed to avoid problems with merges on tables with primary keys:

In this article you’ll learn how to speed up the aggregation of joined/merged tables by orders of magnitude (I recorded up to 30 times faster execution times). This method works for merges where both table have multiple rows for each keys. If one of your tables has a primary key, the method Chris Webb describes here works just as good: Chris Webb’s article on how to improve performance on aggregations after joins using primary keys .

You can follow along the different methods in this file: PerformanceAggregationsAfterMerges1_Upload.zip

Background

When you join a table to another table in Power Query, the UI gives you the option to either expand the columns (default) or aggregate the contents of the joint tables. That’s useful if multiple rows are returned for the rows of the table that has been joined to (left table):