Power BI Archives – Page 21 of 26

Machine Learning with M in PowerBI and Excel

2017-03-26 by Admin

Very often I have thought about trying M instead of R for machine learning problems in PowerBI. Not only because I’m such a big fan of M, but also because we don’t have the R-integration in Excel (yet?). Leila Etaati’s brilliant series of how to use R in PowerBI for KNN-prediction (nearest neighbourhood) finally kicked … Read more

Use Slicers for Query Parameters in PowerBI

2018-03-122017-03-22 by Admin

Reading Rob Collie’s latest cool blogpost on how to retrieve slicer selections in Power BI, I couldn’t stop thinking of how awesome it would be, if we could use this technique to pass slicer selections as query parameters to the M-queries in the query editor. Not only would we have a very convenient user interface, … Read more

Guide for switching Signs in Power BI and Power Pivot (bypassing Unary Operators in DAX)

2017-04-242017-03-07 by Admin

In finance & accounting, you very rarely report the figures with the signs of their source systems, but switch (certain) signs according to different needs. Instead of using unary operators for it, I’ll present an easy and dynamic way for it in Power BI and Power Pivot using DAX. It will cover the following 3 main scenarios:

1_SwitchAll: All signs are switched (red)
2_SwitchExpLiab: Expenses and liabilities are switched back to their original values (green)
3_BWT_Indiv: Only the main figure for expenses (or liabilities) carries a minus, all following positions specifying the expenses are (principally) reported as positives (blue)

Switching signs in Power BI and Power Pivot without unary operators

I’m using the sample data from this article but changed the source-data to a double-bookkeeping structure. There signs are used and the transaction entries in your ledger table always add up to zero. This is a method that prevents errors when posting and can also be used to prevent errors in reporting. If you keep the signs in your reporting system, all you have to do is add up the relevant figures and the returned (absolute) figures will always be correct. If you have read my previous articles on Easy P&L, you have seen this method in action: No minus-operation there, just a simple stupid adding of all accounts who fall into several (sub-) total categories via the bridge-table.

The Account-table also contains of (sub-) totals and the column “AccountType” shows if the positions are regarded as Turnover (Revenue) or Expenses:

1_SwitchAll

My values on “1_SwitchAll” corresponds to “FinalValue” in the article above. The revenues come from consultancy and coursed provided. But the revenue for courses don’t just consist of attendee rates, but the costs for catering and paid instructors shall be deducted (highlighted in yellow). So the “good” numbers that contribute to cash in your pocket shall be reported without a sign and the “bad” numbers that result in an outflow of cash shall be reported with a minus. Within the expenses category, the costs carry a minus and the travel refunds (highlighted in orange), which are cash positive, are reported as positives.

2_SwitchExpensesLiabilities

Another requirement that is often used for balance-sheet-reporting or reports that only report on cost-situations, require that the costs or liabilities are reported without signs. … Principally, because the reimbursements/cost deductions shall be reported with an opposite sign (to show the adverse effect to the cashflow). This is what “2_SwitchExpLiab” shows (not covered in the article).

3_BWT (“BossWantsThat”)

Last but not least comes a typical “BossWantsThat”-requirement: Basically some strange stuff that you just have to deliver. Here the main categories “Revenues” and “Expenses” shall be shown with the signs that reflect the cash-direction, but all specifications that follow below shall be reported without signs (again: Principally, because positions with opposite cash-effects than the main category shall carry inverted signs).

Reporting techniques covered with this approach

Blending data in PowerBI like in Tableau

2017-02-23 by Admin

Today I came across a question in the PowerBI-forum if blending data was possible in Power BI like in Tableau. Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, it’s definitely is a nice challenge. So the following function will interlace the rows from 2 tables like the blending-function in Tableau does. Just that we cannot use any aggregators … Read more

Dynamically flatten Parent-Child Hierarchies in DAX and PowerBI

2020-11-162017-02-14 by Admin

If you use DAX to flatten Parent-Child hierarchies you will end up with a table that has a static number of columns (like described here). If you need a dynamic solution instead, which creates just as many level-columns as there are needed for the current data, you can use DAX’s helper-tool Power Query (or Get Data in Excel) or the query-editor in PowerBI, which uses the language M.

Another advantage of this solution is that you can script the table creation in one step (only flaw: You still need to manually adjust your hierarchy though): But it saves time in creating the table, especially if you have many levels.

Update 2017-Dec-2: It also handles multiple parents now.

2 simple steps to flatten Parent-Child Hierarchies

copy the following function,
add a new step to your current table where you call this function, filling in the following parameters:
- table name (which is the name of the previous step in your M-query)
- name of the column with the child-key
- name of the column with the parent-key
- name of the column who’s values shall be shown in the levels (can also be child-key)

Endless loops

If the relationships in your data are ambiguous, i.e. items stand in parent-child as well as child-parent-relationship to each other, and endless loop would occur. The newest version (V2 upwards) caters for this possibility and will generate a warning and return only the rows that are subject to the endless loop to examine.

And this is the code:

Automatical or Bulk- Rename Columns in Power BI and Power Query

2017-03-142017-01-30 by Admin

Edit 7th Feb 2017: Friendly reader Roknic pointed out in the comments below that there’s actually an existing function for it in M: Table.TransformColumnNames 🙂

So the first of my example below would actually look like this:

Table.TransformColumnNames(Source, each Text.Replace(_, " ", "_"))

But still keeping my original post here, as the transformations in them might help for other use cases:

If you want to rename all of your table’s columns with a common rule, like “replace all spaces by underscore” or just “delete all spaces”, check out this easy method:

The above formula will replace all spaces (” “) by underscores (“_”).

How does it work:

The 2nd argument in the Table.RenameColumns-formula is a list of lists, just like in Table.TransformColumnType from this article. So we apply the same technique here: List.Transform transforms a single element from a list into a list-item, whose 2nd argument will be calculated with a Text.Replace-function.