I find it interesting that after it's been out for a long while, and after some great attempts by non-Microsoft sources to provide an adequate definition, I am still struggling with being able to provide a succinct explanation of what Power BI is to my customers. My best attempt thus far has boiled down to … Continue reading What is Power BI?
Time for another correction… A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how to load data into a Power Pivot model using Power Query. As I was writing it, I was very excited about being able to decouple my Power Pivot models from physical data by using Power Query. Unfortunately, at a time, … Continue reading Date Management Gateway Now Supports Refresh from Power Query
In this post I wanted to address several general confusions about Power BI and Microsoft Office. Sometimes I wonder if these confusions have been engineered by design or whether they occurred serendipitously… The most important point to understand is that Power BI is intended to be bundled with the Office 365 Pro version of the … Continue reading Support of Power BI across various versions of Microsoft Office
Microsoft has released the latest update for my favorite Power BI tool. There are several cool albeit minor improvements to the functionality. The post at the link does a great job of describing the new changes, so I am not going to rehash them here. What I do find interesting, however, is that Microsoft is … Continue reading The March 2014 Release of Power Query is now available to download
Data Catalog is one of the most interesting features of Power BI, however, there are several strange idiosyncrasies that I would like to surface in this post. The first one is the fact there is no way to access the data catalog from the Power BI admin site (if there is one, it must be … Continue reading How to delete a Power Query from the Data Catalog
I just got back from the SharePoint conference and wanted to write down a few points about the Power BI Data Management Gateway before I forgot. It appears that there may be a progression in how Power Query may get used by an organization. I cannot say I am 100% clear on all the scenarios … Continue reading Power BI Data Management Gateway and OData
I may be using the term Data Catalog somewhat liberally here, but since we don't have the official definition of this term yet, I hope I don't get myself in too much trouble here. As I have been experimenting with various features of Power BI, I have been creating and sharing queries in the Data Catalog; … Continue reading How to access Data Catalog in Power BI
In this post I will walk you through all the steps necessary to expose your on premise enterprise data to your Power BI users of Power Query in Excel and also will demonstrate how to source that data into a Power Pivot workbook. I am not going to give you too much theory, rather, I … Continue reading How to configure on premise access in Power BI and use Power Query to load on premise data into Power Pivot
I have to admit, I like Power Query more and more every day. Even though on one hand sometimes I feel that the tool will only appeal to a very specific type of power users, on the other hand, I can't help but feel that the tool is so good that I wonder if it … Continue reading How to load Power Query directly into Power Pivot
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