Ajan's BI Blog

Power BI is a visualization tool for intelligence analysis. In my personal carrier I have been working with this tool for over a period of half-year and the tool is very user-friendly with engaging UI and an easier learning curve. For the past few months, the arising question is to have a better filtering mechanism throughout the reports with multiple pages in power BI, so that people can precisely view what they want. This has been earlier enabled by the introduction of the drill-through feature which requires some hassle for the end-user to navigate to a specific point which involves multiple key presses and it is not a healthy experience in an end-user perspective.  The newly introduced sync slicers seem to be a better alternative than the drill through but how far does it fit and is it really better than the drill through? Let’s dig more on to this, and it's you to decide. First of all, I would like to say what does the sync slicers exactly does. “Sync slicer...

In my day to day work I work with DAX, it is a routine for me to create measures and query data for the user requirements, in my personal experience DAX allows to see what you can not simply see, it's a revolution of identifying what do you have in your hands, so I thought of highlighting few points and elaborating more on the usage of DAX.  First and foremost the important fact is there are three types of calculations that can be defined using DAX in a model and they are as following. 1.        Calculated Columns 2.        Calculated Tables 3.        Measures Even though we have both MDX and DAX for querying if we are adding a logic to the model it can only be achieved by DAX, Dax can also be used to add row level security, if we consider Power BI we can create roles and assign those roles with restricted data. For an example if we have regional data for China, Unit...

In the previous blogs I was more focused in Power BI since i work with it day to day, but this time we are going to dig into increasing the usability features of tableau. This blog revolves around the end-user simplicity, if a model is hard to comprehend then it will be a disaster, so we should deploy some means to stay simple. So without further ado lets head on to the first topic of the day. Configuring table and  column  properties. A model can consist of many tables but the important fact is they have to be unique and it is better if we can have a table description to elaborate on whats it about. This can be also considered as an internal documentation, when a project member is changed it is easy to pick up and continue. We use connections to load data for the tables and we have a connection name for it but once if we set the source it cannot be changed in the latter part, so be mindful because once you are dropping a connection you are losing all th...

Hologram is a technology of creating a three-dimensional image formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source. An interference pattern of photographs which are properly illuminated can create a 3 dimensional effect. This can lead up to the extent of creating 3 dimensional dynamic images which can be observed by bear eyes without the assistant of glasses or any other visual aids. A simple simulation of creating a static 3 dimensional hologram can be done with our smartphones, all we need is 1.        A transparent Pyramid which is made of glass or plastic.  2.        Four images placed in the vertices of a square which are properly illuminated by phone's screen brightness. 3.        Ambient light or low light area to view the hologram without noise. Then you can see the magic. Hologram is a game changer, for an example i...

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...