Ajan's BI Blog

Select same type of multiple visuals to format properties. Imagine a Power Bi report which has 8 cards and you have 10 reports like that, in order to change the properties of all, how time consuming it is, but there is an easy way of doing it. Power Bi allows to select multiple visuals by using “ctrl” and click. So you need to select the multiple same type of visuals in order to work with them simultaneously. In the above image you can notice that I have selected multiple cards using “ctrl” and click and in the right side you can also notice that it allows certain options to be used in the “format” pane here we can add title, change back ground, add border and various artistic changes to the selected visuals. Can you notice that I have done multiple common changes to the selected visuals and it is applied to all? This method is very helpful when you do common changes in multiple same type of visuals as it saves a lot of time. This method only works f...

Case- In some cases we need to filter the data that has been imported from a SQL server database where it is not advisable to create a new query all the time. Prerequisite – You need to have a SQL server database where it should contain a two column table with "town-id" and ''town-name'' also you need to create a stored procedure to accept town-id as input parameter and return the town-name as out put.  We are going to run a native query in Power BI with changing parameter values so in order to avoid too many confirmations go to "Files" then "Option and Settings" then "Option" then "Security" then untick Require user approval for new database queries in Power BI. Calling a stored procedure from SQL server when importing data to Power BI As you can see above I have chosen “SQL Server” in the “get data” option from task bar in order to import data from SQL Server database. Then I have given the serve...

Choosing beautiful colors for an attention seeking Power BI report is always challenging. Sometimes we may have an important message but it might go unseen if proper color scheme is not used, so it is important to create reports which are informational and visually appealing. In this blog our main objective is to get an idea about selecting appropriate color scheme and tools that can be beneficial to do this. What is a color scheme? As you all know not all colors look great together and you can tell stories by just having only two colors, have a look at the following image, there in the middle you can see a circle with same color and same dimension, only thing that changes is the back ground, but depending on the back ground the way you see those circles are totally different. Some small circles appear softer, some appear sharper, and some are brighter also you might notice movements or depth effect too. It is important to choose colors wisely to serve the purp...

When we are doing any kind of solution our main focus is to satisfy our end users and to deliver a very user friendly solution in the end. We need to make their lives simple and it can be done by many means and one of them is allowing them to use voice commands to serve their purposes. In this blog first of all we will create a Cortana card in Power BI and allow the end user to view their interests by voice command in windows devices, then we will download Power BI application from app store and use Q&A voice command to get insights, currently there is no proper way of integrating Power BI and voice command in android devices but it will be there in near future. Important pre requisite You need to have Power BI pro account in order to share a Cortana card via an app, this can be created in Power BI services including end user for him or her to be able to integrate that to their Cortana and to activate it using voice command or by a simple search. You need to have d...

Case- I have a data set which has to be visualized in a ragged hierarchy. What is ragged hierarchy A ragged hierarchy is a user defined hierarchy with an uneven number of levels.   You can see the above table which has 5 levels of hierarchy. In the first level we only have “World” as a category then moving forward to the next level we have two categories  namely “UK” and “USA” likewise the level of hierarchy is drilling down up to five levels with an uneven amount of categories. Creating a hierarchy in Power BI In the above image  you can notice that I have right clicked the “level 1” column which has to be the first level of our hierarchy, Once it is right clicked there you will notice “New hierarchy” as the second option then you will have to click that in order to create a new one. As you can notice in the above image once I have created a new hierarchy then a new column is created named “Level 1 Hierarchy” in that I have d...