Thank you to everyone that attended this past Tuesday’s webinar hosted by Pragmatic Works called Introduction to Power BI Desktop. We had a great turn out! If you missed the webinar, you can view the recording here.

Check out these five Power BI tips!

There were lots of great questions and far too many to answer during the webinar so I thought I’d answer a few of the questions here.

Q: What is best way to handle relationships when table has composite key of 2 or more columns?

A: If you need to create a relationship between two tables based on two or more columns, create a calculated column in each table using the columns necessary and then create the relationship based on the new calculated columns. Here’s a nice little write-up using PowerPivot, but the steps should be about the same for Power BI: http://www.sqlant.com/2013/06/powerpivot-can-do-compound-key.html

Q: I notice that Power BI interprets all integers as being sums. How do I tell it not to sum those ID columns that should never be summed?

A: To keep a field from being aggregated by default, set the Default Summarization to Do Not Summarize.

Q: During the query-building process, does adding a case statement require editing code directly, or is there a GUI interface?

A: To create a case statement, use the conditional column transformation. See this blog post here and take a look at the last tip: https://sqldusty.com/2016/06/29/5-more-power-bi-tips/

Q: Can I export a POWER BI page as .pdf?

A: You sure can. Read about printing and exporting here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-print/

Q: Is Power BI Service Free?

A: There’s a free version and a paid version of the Power BI service called Pro. The big differences between the free and Pro licenses is that Pro gives you a higher data capacity limit, advanced collaboration and sharing features, and the ability to leverage on-prem data sources. You can read more about differences between the free and Pro licenses here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Resources

If you missed the webinar, watch the recording here: http://pragmaticworks.com/Training/Details/Introduction-to-Power-BI-Desktop

Because Power BI changes so quickly, the best place to get any of your Power BI questions answered is www.powerbi.com/documentation. The Power BI team does a pretty good job of keeping the documentation up to date.

Feedback

Let me know what you thought of the webinar! Leave a comment down below. And of course, if you have any further questions just post them in the comments!