Posts in Category ‘Power BI’

Automatically create function record for Expression.Evaluate in Power BI and Power Query

Some time ago I wrote a blogpost on how to create a function library in Power BI or Power Query (http://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/08/27/how-to-create-and-use-r-function-library-in-power-bi/). There I also presented a way to pull that function code automatically from GitHub.

Problem

In that code I used the function Expression.Evaluate to execute the imported text and create functions from it. The inbuilt functions that I’ve used in that code have to be passed as an environment record at the end of the expression. I’ve used #shared for it, as this returns a record with all native M-functions and is quick and easy to write (if environments are new to you, check out this series: https://ssbi-blog.de/the-environment-concept-in-m-for-power-query-and-power-bi-desktop/ ). But as it turns out, this can cause problems when publishing to the service unfortunately (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/208b9365-91e9-4802-b737-de00bf027e2a/alternative-calling-function-with-text-string?forum=powerquery – please leave a vote if you would like to use #shared in the service as well).

Solution

To bypass these problems, you can specify each used function individually (as you can see in Tony McGoverns newest treasure here for example: https://www.tonymcgovern.com/powerquery/calculate-percentile/ ).

But depending on the length and complexity of your function, determining which functions are used and manually write down the record can become a bit laborious and spoil the fun. Therefore, I’ve created a function that does that for you autoMagically:

The formula

For the record

Pass in the query text as the first parameter and you’ll get a text string for the record:

Function record for Expression.Evaluate

For the query

And if you additionally pass in the URL for your function code as well, the full Expression.Evaluate-statement will automatically be created for you:

Full query text for Expression.Evaluate

Be aware, that the results of these functions are text that you have to copy and paste into your function code. You cannot simply reference the query, as this would repeat the problem with #shared.

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

Permutations table in Power BI or Power Query in Excel

Today my husband came with a special task to me: He had to re-wire an old instrument on board of our sailing boat and “lost” the original matching instructions. There were 4 cables to go into 4 different holes, which left him with 24 possible combinations. So he needed a permutations table with all possible combinations that he could print out and tick each combination that he would try subsequently:

To be honest, he was quicker in creating the permutations table manually in Excel than me in Power Query, as it took me a while to develop an easy enough algorithm. But the technique I came out with at the end is so typical “Power Query”-ish, that I’m going to share it here:

The Video

The Function

Here comes the function code:

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

Stretching and Compressing Time Series with Power Query and Power BI

The good folks from SumProduct have published a challenge for Excel that I find worth doing in Power Query instead:

The Challenge

Stretching or compressing a forecast so that the proportion of the original series will be maintained:

The Function

This is not so easy mathematically (as the solution-blogpost explains in detail), so the code for the function isn’t short as well:

Read more

Migrate a Power Query or Power BI file to a local SSAS instance

In Visual Studio there is a wizard to migrate an Excel Power Pivot model to a SSAS model. But this will not bring over the M-queries unfortunately. But there is a workaround to achieve this. It requires SQL Server 2017 or higher:

The steps:

  1. Import the Excel file in Power BI Desktop, save and close the pbix-file
  2. Open Azure Analysis service, open the Web Designer and create a new model where you import the pbix
  3. Open that model with Visual Studio (this will actually create a download that holds the VS-file)
  4. Open that file in Visual Studio, load the data, build and change the deployment target from Azure to you local SSAS-database before deploying.

See how it goes:

Warning: There are some limitations for the M-functionalities in SSAS (see here for example: General Overview by Microsoft or Use your own SQL … by Chris Webb), so you might want to give it a thorough test before rolling out. There are missing a lot of data sources currently, like web-queries for example who will hopefully soon be added as well.

This method has been described by Soheil Bakhshi here before: http://biinsight.com/import-power-bi-desktop-model-to-ssas-tabular-2017-using-azure-analysis-services/ 

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

A generic SWITCH-function for the query editor in Power BI and Power Query

Although you can easily replicate the DAX SWITCH-function via list-, table- or record functions in M, I thought it would be convenient for many newbies to have a comfortable M-SWITCH-function that uses (almost) the same syntax than its DAX-equivalent:

SWITCH (
[Month],
    1, “January”,
    2, “February”,
    3, “March”,
    4, “April”,
    5, “May”,
    6, “June”,
    7, “July”,
    8, “August”,
    9, “September”,
    10, “October”,
    11, “November”,
    12, “December”,
    “Unknown month number”
)
DAX Formatter by SQLBI

The DAX-SWITCH-function will retrieve the content of its first argument (expression) ([Month]) and check it against he first parameters of the following pairs (value). If there is a match, the second parameter of the pairs (result, here: month name) is returned and if there is no match, “Unknown month number” will be returned.

How it works

The syntax for the M-function looks like so:

M.Switch(Expression as any, Values as list, Results as list, optional Else as text)

So we have 4 parameters: The Expression just like in DAX, but then the Values and Results come as separate lists. The last optional argument is just similar to DAX again.

This allows for a very convenient entry of function parameters:

1. You can quickly enter numerical ranges:

M.Switch(Month, {1..12}, {"January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"}, "Unknown month number")

2. You can super-easily refer to switch-values in tables:

It has just one minor flaw: When you refer to a parameter or another query in the Expression-field, you will be default get an error first. But removing the 2 quotes will quickly fix it:

This is because I’ve set the format of this field to “any”, as the condition can actually be of any type. But the function-dialogue has no way to handle different types currently and will transform all entries to text by default in that case.

It uses a technique that I’ve used in this article already: There you can see that the results can also be functions for example.

Function code

Most of the code is documentation (row 7 onwards) or handles the missing values: Row 5+6 will return the value from the optional 4th argument (Else) if used, otherwise the default-value: “Value not found” will be returned. The main function logic (in row 4) is the positional index indicator: {List.PositionOf(Values, Expression)} that is applied to the list of Results. List.OfPositions will return the position (number) of where the Expression has been found in the list of Values. That x-th value will then be picked from the list.

Enjoy & stay queryious 😉

Web Scraping 1: Combine multiple tables from one page in Power BI and Power Query

This is a step-by-step description of how to combine multiple tables from one webpage into one table with categories as output. You can also apply this technique to combine tables from other sources as well (like from folder method for example or multiple different webpages (see in an upcoming article)).

Sometimes the page you want to scrape has multiple tables like here:

0 – Combine multiple tables into one: Input

And you want to combine them into 1 with a Category-column like so:

1 – Combine multiple tables into one: Result

Overview

I will present 2 methods here:

  1. Append-method: This is the obvious one and is fast for just a few tables.
  2. Add-Column-method: A bit more complicated but will be faster for a large number of tables and is also suitable for a dynamic number of tables.

You will also find 2 options at the end of this article:

  1. Use custom functions for multi-step table transformations
  2. Use dynamic filters to select the desired tables

 

Append method

Read more