My Data & BI Summit Recap

I finally came around to writing a wrap-up for the Data & BI Summit in Dublin last month.
No fancy pictures or colors, just a to-the-point summary.

New features

• Incremental refresh – Premium (included in May update as preview feature)
• Drillthrough with current filters and parameters (included in May update)
• Common Data Service For Analytics (preview live)
• Theme file additions coming soon:
• Theme export
• Background added to themes
• Table/matrix headers
• Persistent filters (per user) in the service
• Buttons to trigger action (included in May update)
• Q&A and linguistics
• App workspaces without Office365 group

Modelling

• Optimize your model (size)
• Make use of Query folding in Power Query
• Applies to Import mode only
• Filter first, Transform later
• Use supported transformations first, non-folding steps at the end
• Writing a SQL query in Get Data prevents folding
• Create a blank query with #shared to show a document library of all M functions (Blog)

Visualization

• Choose a theme
• Report theme generator at PowerBI.tips
• Color Theme Creator at Aka.ms/pbitheme
• Outlining
• Canva.com
• PowerPoint
• PowerBI.tips
• Storytelling, with:
• Custom visuals (e.g. Timeline Storyteller)
• Bookmarks
• Tooltip pages
• PowerApps visual
• Drillthrough
• Syncing slicers

Governance

• Use App Workspaces for DTAP
• DEV_Finance
• UAT_Finance
• Finance
• Use Onedrive for Business for versioning your pbix-files, with the same folders as the App Workspace
• Use the API’s with PowerShell to copy resources between workspaces
• Chriss Webb (@cwebb_bi) wrote a successful script in response to a video from Adam Saxton (@GuyInACube)

Best practices and notes

Visualization | Model

• Driving table for measures
• Hide unused columns
• Totals in matrix and tables insensitive to row filters
• Uniform naming of measures and calculations
• Sync slicers
• Add descriptions where possible
• Make sure filters are not hardcoded

Governance

• Add an about page with last refresh date time and description of Model
• Version the Model
• Schedule datasets using Admin account for one place to monitor failure notification emails
• Use one drive as source control
• Golden dataset

Further reading

• Power BI Whitepapers
• PowerBI.tips
• Power BI User Voice

@NickyvV