In an old cartoon was promoted a saying: “Cats and mice can be friends”. Consequently, Excel and Power BI can also be friends! Power BI allows you to import Excel reports, whether traditional, Pivot or Power Pivot reports. This is not a whole new topic, but I think it would be nice to remember it in a new light, with an emphasis on what you can do for free and when you definitely have to buy licenses.
Last year brought us another interesting Power BI Desktop feature. When importing tables into a data model, it is possible to specify a data category for the selected columns. Choosing a category can accurately determine what data is in the table. This way we get some new features, e.g. to include a link to a site or an image describing the products within the table.
Power BI Desktop got updated ribbons! The new, modern design, simplifies operation significantly because options are better grouped and easier to find. It is very similar to the one we encountered in Office365 applications and appeared as one of the preview features in November 2019. From April 2020, this should become the default look of the Power BI Desktop development environment, let’s see what new it brings.
DAX is a language that comes in several flavors. While most features are available at the same time for Excel, Power BI and SQL Server Analysis Services some of them are platform-specific. Because Power BI has the ability to generate tables and there are DAX functions that, as a result, return tables in this post we will address some of them that can only be only used in Power BI DAX statements, not in Excel.
Power BI is, for the most part, used for business reporting purposes, and the ultimate goal is to publish company data in the cloud, along with related reports, and then create reporting dashboards that provide the information necessary to support decision making. A free Power BI subscription can also be used for this, but I still recommend that you use (purchase) a Power BI Professional license. Why? More about this in the text that follows …