In my working world we utilize Paginated Reports quite heavily and the release of this visual is truly game changing. Now instead of having to move from between Power BI reports to visualize data the way that you want to see it, you are finally able to interact with the data in a single, seamless report. This also opens the Paginated Reporting world to lots of more people who may not have considered this report type until now.
I sat down to write this blog post and apparently I had quite a bit to say because what was meant to be a simple blog post turned into a 30 page white paper. In the white paper I cover a simple reporting solution that I want to utilized a Paginated Report in, how to use a SharePoint Online list a the tracking mechanism, how to create a simple paginated report, how to publish the report into the Power BI Service, and finally how to utilize the new Paginated Report visual in a Power BI Report canvas. The last one of these is what I am going to focus on in this post.
If you want to find the full white paper please feel free to click here to access it. To read about is just the new Paginated Report visual, the please continue reading! One thing to keep in mind with this post… it is a excerpt from the white paper, so anything that doesn’t quite make sense probably does in the context of the full white paper. Here goes!
The Paginated Report visual became available in the June 2021 update of Power BI Desktop as a Preview Feature. This means that you must manually enable it once you have updated to the June 2021 version of Power BI Desktop. To do this you go to File | Options and settings | Options.
Next go to Preview features under GLOBAL and check the box for âPaginated report visualâ. We will be required to restart Power BI Desktop once you are done with this step.
Now we can connect to a report. Click the big yellow button and the screen will change to show us the available Paginated Reports that you can choose from.
Once we select the Report, we need to add in Parameters before moving forward. Drag the Date & Day Name Fields into the Parameters field in the Visualization pane.
After we have done that we will want to change the Date from a hierarchy to a single date so that it can be sliced properly.
Next, we click the âSet Parametersâ button and change the parameters from the âuse defaultâ option to the specific Power BI fields that we want to use. Once that is done, we click the âSee Reportâ button.
Once the report renders, we will see the Paginated Report showing up in the visual space we placed it in and filtered to match the rest of the Power BI Report.
If we change the month from June to May in the Year,Month slicer we will get a dialog at the top left of the Paginated Report visual that says âApply Changesâ while the rest of the report simply changes. This is the default setting as of the June 2021 release and allows us to not have to wait for the Paginated Report visual to refresh, which takes longer than the other visuals, incase we want to tweak our slicers a few times before seeing the Paginated Results.
This behavior changed under the Formatting tab of the Visualizations pane when the Paginated Report visual is selected. That can be tricky at times, so I recommend using the Selection pane (found under the View menu in the ribbon) to help us get this visual selected.
In the formatting options we will find âAuto-apply filtersâ as a toggle. We will only see âAuto-apâŚâ as the default layout of the Visualizations pane is small. Once toggled we will see the âApply changesâ box disappear, and it will automatically refresh as we change the slicers.
While we are making updates in the Visualizations pane, I would encourage you to enable the Toolbar in the visual so that you can do things like change pages and Export data to all of the formats Paginated Reports is able to export to.
Conclusion
I hope that you find the Paginated Report visual as amazing as I do. It is going to change the way my customers work with their data.
Alright folks, this is what drove me to write this entire series in the first place. I finally get to geek out about home automation! In part 3 of this series I talked about ergonomics & overall wellness which is worth a read if you jumped straight to this because it is geeky and about gear too.
When we moved into our house 5 years ago I decided that I wanted to start making the shift to leverage home automation as much as we could. My wife is more old school than I am, so there is a delicate balance that we have found between what I want and what she will allow. I have no illusions about it, she is the boss. If the boss isn’t happy, nobody is going to be happy no matter how cool their geek toys are.
I am not going to go into all of the aspects of our home automation partly because they don’t relate directly to optimization of working from home, and partly because there are sickos out there that I don’t want to have details about my home defense posture… which is rigid. Imagine Pitfall with bigger 8-bit alligators. Just don’t try it…
Lighting in general
Everyone in the world is in love with light rings… except for me. I hate them. Like Golum hates Hobbits, I hate light rings. Toss in any light that shines directly IN my face to that category. I know how popular key lights and light rings are right now, but I have been light sensitive my entire life and I cannot look directly into lights or suffer intense pain. I wear sunglasses on cloudy days not because I think it makes me look cool, but because otherwise I literally cannot see.
So what do you do when you need to be on camera most of your working day but cannot tolerate the “optimal lighting”? The issue really is when it comes to web cams it is ALL about the lighting. The best webcam in bad lighting is most often worse than a terrible webcam with great lighting. People use light rings because they make you look fantastic not because they like them.
My home automation setup
Cut to my home automation project. I did my research and found that Philips Hue was the brand that I was going to standardize my house on. The link I just gave is to a search page because there are lots of options in the Hue line. When I was just starting this there was a rebate going on and prices were at the floor for LED bulbs, but occasionally you can find deals on these because they are not cheap.
Smart Hub
You need 1 Philips Hue Smart Hub in your network that can control everything. The Smart Hub integrates with both Amazon Alexa and Apple Home Kit, as well as other platforms like home security systems.
There are alternatives to Philips Hue such as Samsung SmartThings and others. If that is the path you decide to take or just want to hear more on the topic, I encourage you to go check out my friends AC & CJ’s podcast, The Microsoft Cloud Show, in the episode where they geek out on home automation using these kinds of alternatives. Their show is great overall so you should check it out even if you go follow my path.
The smart hub concept allows me to tie into the lights from many controlling devices such as the Echo Dot that sits on my desk or in the kitchen, the Flic button I got for speaking at the SharePoint Conference a few years ago, and even the widgets on my iPhone and iPad.
Office & Camera lighting
I have a ceiling fan in my office with a lighting kit that contains 4 bulbs. At first I went with 4 Philips Hue White A19 60W bulbs, but I didn’t care for the whites for the duration that I spend in the office. I tried a pair of Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance A19 LED Smart Bulb with 2 of the white bulbs and found it to be better. Over time I switched out for all color bulbs and have added a bit of blue into the white to get the desired effect.
That solved the ambient light riddle but not the camera lighting issue. Since I cannot stand looking into lights I went with an old school solution that Jilly suggested: overhead track lighting.
my overhead track lighting
The cost was considerably lower than most of the fancy light ring & key light solutions I looked at with the added benefit of being out of my vision. With the smart bulbs I am able to get the brightness just right.After a trip to Home Depot & a purchasing pair of Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance BR30 LED Smart Bulb from smile.amazon.com I was all set.
Free / Busy lighting
There is a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young called Teach Your Children that plays in my head when we get to this topic. Having worked from home for so long and having kids there is a game that you have to play around free/busy. I have found that you cannot always be busy when they are around or else you can never be truly busy.
There are many awesome community folks out there that have created project that connect to the Skype/Zoom/Teams APIs and get Free/Busy to set home automation lighting so that you can alert the others in your house to your status. I found this to be a complete failure for me because my calendar is always full and the red light was always on. The kids therefore didn’t respect it and would just walk right in regardless.
For the past couple of years I have manually set my “alerting” lights to indicate when I cannot be disturbed and need the house to be quieter than normal. This has worked out fabulously.
The only bathroom on the first floor of our house is just outside my office door and the hall light contains 2 Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance A19 LED Smart Bulbs. The light stays off until I set the widget on my iPhone to on-air. The light is visible from the living room, kitchen, and breakfast room.
The iPhone widgets
There is also a light outside the kids playroom/classroom upstairs that turns red when I set the widget to on-air. This makes sure that no matter where in the house you are it is obvious that I need it to be quiet.
By using this setting expeditiously I am able to get the other occupants, save the cats, to respect the on-air light and my need for quiet.
The younger dude gets it
Wrapping it up
Since we are just a few minutes to go live on the Microsoft Ignite Table Talk that caused me to finally write this up I am going to have to put a bow on this series for now. I am sure that there are things that I forgot to mention, but hopefully you have found this all useful.
Everyone finds their own optimal set up for working from home eventually. The key is tweaking things until you get yourself most comfortable. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and your tips down in the comments.
In part 2 of this series I talked about making work & life balance which I think is a good lead in to this topic of ergonomics & wellness. This has been a concern of mine for many years because I started having pains that were eventually linked to repetitive stress. Since I am not going to stop spending 12 to 20 hours a day in front of a screen I needed to figure out some ways to manage my self better.
I mentioned some of the gear that I use in part 2, specifically the Logitech Ergo K860 keyboard and MX Master 3 mouse which are both ergonomic, but I did not talk much about the rest of my ergonomic setup. Let’s dive into some of those details now.
Desk stuff
For years I used a glass top, L-shaped desk which served me well but was not very ergo friendly. I retired it 3 years ago but kept it as a storage table for my home servers until COVID turned my house into the Himmelstein Academy of Home Based Academia and my older Dude claimed it for his bedroom based classroom.
When I retired that desk I searched far and wide for the work space I wanted. I had long envisioned myself sitting behind a beautiful desk of rich mahogany surrounded by many leather bound books… wait that was a butchered line from Anchorman… in all reality I had no idea what I wanted but I figured I would know it when I saw it. I had a few criteria:
sturdy & would last a long time
no drawers to hide clutter in
no keyboard tray under the desk
ability to use as a standing desk
no reflective surface
I ended up getting a Jarvis standing desk from Fully. I chose the 78 x 30″ Bamboo desk and it has been serving me very well. I opted against the swooped curve at the front and take full advantage of the surface.
Standing at my desk vs sitting
I get antsy if I sit for too long. The idea of a standing desk was very appealing to me, but everyone around me told me that it was a fad thing and that I would not use it nearly as much as I thought I would. Cut to 3 years later when I stand at my desk numerous times a day and I am thrilled with my decision.
I find that I sit when I am doing highly focused activities such as writing, creating, learning, or coding. The times that I consistently stand are for meetings where I am going to be leading discussions, 1-on-1s with team members, and when I am trying to get something done in a shorter period of time than I think it will take. I flex between sitting and standing during longer meetings or when my Apple Watch buzzes to tell me to get up off my ass because I have been sitting for too long.
It is important to think when you want to be standing vs sitting so that you drive yourself to those behaviors. At the beginning it is not a natural shift so you have to be mindful about the action. These days I do it and don’t really notice that I am doing it. My team members used to comment when I would shift in the middle of a meeting but after a while they got used to it and it is just a normal thing now.
Helping with my standing
When I bought my desk I opted to purchase a standing mat at the same time. I did my research and was pleasantly surprised to find that my desk vendor also sold the Topo Comfort Mat by Ergodriven which was my top choice. This mat has different terrains that I use on a daily basis to stretch my legs & feet on.
I can say that half of the reason I switch to standing mode is to help stretch my legs & back. I struggle with back pain & as a runner my legs are always problematic. Getting up and using my Topo mat is something I look forward to because it helps relieve pain & get some of the lactic acid out of my muscles.
Add to all of this that with the wireless headset that I use I find that I can easily pace around my office to keep myself stimulated without needing to go back to the kitchen for an afternoon coffee.
The Chair
DISCLAIMER: I am super fortunate to have a wonderfully supportive & patient wife, Jilly, who puts up with my need to over engineer my world which inevitably means I spend way too much on gear. She is amazing and I appreciate her more than I can ever say.
I burn through home office desk chairs. The longest I have ever had a home office desk chair is about 2 years. Keep in mind for the past 5 years I was on the road roughly half the time and working from home half the time. This does not say good things about the chairs that I have owned.
Yes, I am a big guy. I stand 6’2″ and weigh between 250 & 270 depending upon the quantity of candy & carbs in the house during any given season. Luckily I have stayed on the lower end for the past 2 years thanks to being more active, but that is another blog post. I put stress on seating and I like comfy chairs. My one big requirement over the years is has been the ability to recline and set the angle of the recline at any point.
My last chair finally became no longer viable for me because Nate the Cat had ruined the seat with his claws. Just a side note, it is now his chair in my office as I don’t have the heart to take it away from him since he is getting older and less mobile. I told my awesome wife that I was going to finally invest “real money” in a replacement. I am pretty sure that she was only half listening when she said ok, but I ran away and ordered my new chair.
This is Nate. How could I be mad at that face?
I got the Herman Miller Aeron. When you look up ergonomics in the dictionary I think that this chair is what comes up in the picture. I have had the good fortune of having one for my desk in the offices I have worked at in the past and missed it terribly. There is no comparison to it, but it is horribly overpriced. I am not putting a link to it here because I do not want to be the reason anyone else gets in trouble for spending this much on a desk chair. I justified my purchase because the Herman Miller warranty is 12 years and with how I burn through chairs, I will come out ahead… right?
Mouse ergonomic aid
I used to use a mouse pad with an wrist rest built in, but everything seems to have moved to fabric for the wrist rests nowadays and I severely dislike them. I found the Innovera Softskin Gel Wrist Rest to be just the right thing for me. So much so that I own 3 of them. One is on my desk and the other 2 are in the backpacks that I most frequently travel with to ensure I am never without one. I also keep extra mice in those bags as well because I am far more efficient with a mouse than a trackpad.
One thing about these wrist rests is that TSA is not quite sure what to make of them. After years of getting questioned by the same TSA agents at my local airport I started pulling it out of my bag and putting it with my cell phone and keys so that I don’t have to deal with the extra screening time, even though I am TSA-Pre. 1 out of 3 times the agent picks it up out of the bin, looks at it, gives it a squeeze, I tell them what it is and they let me go without a fuss. The other 2 times they don’t even bother picking it up. Huge time saver.
Wellness
This is a very personal topic area because it is all about what makes & keeps you well, not just physically but mentally also. Getting up and moving around is part of how I keep myself well.
Pre-COVID I was going to Orangetheory Fitness 3-5 days per week regardless of where I was in the world. I was feeling great, sore but great, and then the pandemic hit. My last class was March 16th, until the weekend before Labor Day but I haven’t been back again… yet.
I started running outside when COVID hit but I knew that wasn’t sustainable because I live in Texas and during the summer it is almost like running on the surface of the sun if you try to run outside. I invested my company health benefit in a NordicTrack 1950 treadmill and have put 250 miles on it between May and the first week in September.
I schedule my day around getting to run before family dinner, and it is the best thing for my wellness. I put in my AirPod Pros and just run. The rest of the world disappears for 45 minutes to an hour as I clear my head, get a feeling of accomplishment, and am generally a happier human when I sit down to dinner with Jilly & the Dudes after I run.
Finding that mental and physical outlet is critical and you won’t find it sitting at your desk. Make time for you, it doesn’t cost anything which is the only time I can say that in these recommendations đ
Wrapping it up
In this post I talked about ergonomics & wellness both through gear & self care. Remember that you are investing in yourself with all of this and you get out what you put in. That was clichĂŠ I know, but truth is truth.
In part 1 of this series I talked about the upcoming Microsoft Ignite conference and the Table Talk that I will be participating in. I gave my “bona fides” around the evolution of my remote working background. In this part I will to focus on the factors that have helped me find success over the years and achieve an acceptable balance of life & work in the same space.
When I started my new job with EY and knew that I was going to be home for the rest of 2020 I decided to make sure that my home office was as optimized as humanly possible and allow me to disconnect from work when I should. I have ordered and returned a number of different devices to get things how I have them today and what follows in this post are some of the things I have done & gotten that I have found to be useful.
Define your working space
Trying to work from the couch means you never get to relax on the couch. Subconsciously you are in your working space and will shift back to it way too easily.
17+ years ago when I was a bachelor I realized early on that a one bedroom home situation was not conducive to me ever leaving the work behind and just being a homebody… or a person who could bring dates back to my place because my roommate (work) was ever present. I quickly moved into a place that allowed for me to have a separate work space from living space and never looked back. Even when I was living in a one bedroom home situation I eventually had to define my working space until I was able to get into a multi-bedroom situation.
I understand that not everyone is able to simply move into the apartment next door with 2 bedrooms at a nominal upcharge on rent the way I was able to back then. I didn’t even have to hire movers. The landlords just let me have a week of overlap and I moved everything with one friend. I was really lucky.
If you are in a situation where you do not have the ability to expand your home space, clearly define your working space. It can be as simple as sitting in a different chair at the kitchen table than you normally do, but do something to help you distinguish between work time and home life.
I am fortunate to have a home office that has been clearly defined since we bought our house 5 years ago. The space is 100% mine and it is laid out for work. I used to play games on my home PC in the office, but over time I stopped doing that for the same reasons I listed above. It felt like I was at work rather than at play.
Optimizing your home workstation
One of my first workstations
In my office I have 1 computer. HAHAHA. Who am I kidding? There are anywhere from 4-6 machines in here depending upon what I am doing. If you asked my kids however, they would likely tell you that I only use 1 computer in my office.
Part of the problem I faced was over complication. As with most things, the KISS method works well for optimizing your home workstation.
A few years ago I had a 4 monitor rig (2 monitors stack mounted on pole stands) PLUS 3 horizontal monitors. This is what that looked like:
forgive the messy desk… its an OLD picture
I have had multiple machines hooked up to this setup and I always had multiple keyboards and mice I had to switch between. When I was on the road 200 nights and only working in my home office periodically this was acceptable, but not anymore. It was WAY too complicated and overly distracting for a long term scenario.
After some trial & error I settled on the a cleaner, simpler multi-machine setup. Here is what my desk looks like today:
Much less messy now
This set up has more horsepower than the old one, less light & heat coming from all of those monitors, and allows me to be WAY more focused and effective.
What comes next is a discussion about the the gear that I decided on for my home workstation. I don’t go into the PC hardware or anything, only the peripherals which is what makes the setup work best for me.
Keyboard & Mouse
I landed on the Logitech Ergo K860. Ergonomics is critical for someone who spends 10-16 hours a day in front of a computer. I always used the Microsoft Elite line in the past partly because I really enjoyed the simplicity of the extra function keys and the split keyboard layout. I found that Ergo K860 had the same style to it.
The mouse I chose is the MX Master 3 (this link is to the Logitech site as it appears that most vendors are out of stock on smile.amazon.com and I don’t want to recommend a used mouse). I’ve long been a Logitech mouse fan and my old MX Master had started to fail me a bit after 5+ years of faithful service.
Both of these devices leverage the Logitech Unifying receivers, which is key because it allows me to pair the receiver with multiple Logitech devices and then chose which machine I want to be connecting to at the touch of a button. They both have the ability to pair with up to 3 computers, both PC and Mac.
Sound
It took me a while to figure out that I was really missing out by only having a single pair of speakers that I would move the input between machines. I was using my personal machine less frequently so it felt like less of a big deal at first, but after 2 months I was fed up.
I invested in a set of Bose Companion 20s a couple of years back and LOVE them. They are great & I cannot say enough good things about them, so much so that I was willing to move the input between machines for months. However since I did not want to have to wear headphones all the time I decided that I needed more flexibility.
As a second set of speakers I invested in a set of Logitech Z200s for around $25. They work just fine for listening to Microsoft PGI calls and general conference calling purposes.
Listening to calls on speakers is nice, and easy when the house is empty. Not so easy when the house is not only my office but the Dudes school & living space. I need to make sure that I am not being distracted by the animals that live in my house (both cats and the Dudes qualify in this) and the general noises that go on when the house is occupied.
I have had a set of Bose on-ear noise cancelling headphones for years and a second set of Bose in-ear noise cancelling headphones that I highly recommend. They are older models but they still serve me well. My younger Dude took over my on-ear set when school started up and I recently started wearing hearing aids which means that my in-ear set require a shift. I also moved away from my Mac which means that my awesome AirPod Pros do not help with this situation as much.
That lead me to the new Sony MX4s. I am still tinkering with the Bluetooth settings to get the music audio to sound great, but for my work calls they have FANTASTIC sound quality and are comfortable while wearing my hearing aids.
Microphone & Camera input
The Blue Yeti USB mic is what I use for recording the podcast or doing streaming activities. I thought about upgrading and getting a Focusrite Scarlett mic preamp to attach one of my higher quality microphones to my machine, but the Yeti has served me well for the past few years.
I am a fan of the Logitech C920 web cam. At one point I had one setup on each of my PCs, until my older Dude needed it to have a better audio and video setup for doing Middle School Band remotely this year.
Once again I was left in a situation where I was shifting USB devices between machines. I decided to search for a solution and got recommended the UGREEN USB 3.0 Sharing Switch from my friend fellow Microsoft Ignite Speaker, Adam Saxton, since he does so much with his setup for Guy In A Cube.
<INSERT SHAMELESS SESSION PLUGHERE>
He & I are doing an Ask the Experts session together on Wednesday September 22nd at 7a Central Time… to be fair it is his session, I’m just helping him out. We are also doing an Ignite Social Hour that afternoon at 4:30p Central Time.
The Sharing Switch was exactly what I needed. This device does a good job with a slow switch operation. By this I mean I use it to move from one PC to the other and don’t try to flip right back. I tried this once and the PCs both got confused and didn’t want to recognize the devices.
One life hack I have been recommending to people who have asked me for webcam recommendations in the past 6 months is to not use a webcam at all. Instead to use their cell phone as a webcam via Teams or Zoom. Teams handles this extremely well because it allows you to be on multiple devices under the same login.
It is not slanderous to say that web conferencing software is a resource hog on your PC. It is especially bad when you turn video on. Both of my PCs are high powered systems and the GPU spikes on both of them when I turn video on in Teams, and I always have video on. I find that it personalizes meetings and when people see that I am doing it, they do too. The internal monologue they are having sounds something like “If that funny looking guy can be on video I guess I can too”.
I spent less than $20 and got myself a mini tripod and a very solid smart phone mount that I use to do video calls on when I am doing resource intensive operations on my PC. Often I am in Teams screen sharing Power BI Desktop from my PC and have audio and video on my iPhone 11 Pro. This allows me to use my AirPod Pro headphones as well. I show up in the call only one time too.
I just sent this tripod & mount solution I linked to above to my awesome niece. That tripod came with a cell phone mount, but I prefer the one I linked to separately because it felt more sturdy while being very inexpensive.
Closing
In this post I shared some details about how I balance my life and separate my work. The key to everything above is finding the comfort zone for you and those around you.
The core message I am trying to convey is that if you can find a way to simplify your work space you can make more room for your life. That separating is key. When we work where we live it can be difficult to put the work away. If you can simplify and carve out that space, you will have an easier time walking away.
You don’t have to spend a ton to get there either, I am just a geek and like my toys. There are lots of low cost options that you can find to do everything I have talked about.
In the next part of this series I will share my experiences with ergonomics and then wrap up the last part of the series with a post about lighting & home automation. I’m going to save the best geeky stuff for last đ
Microsoft Ignite is just around the corner and I am excited to be a part of the event once again. I have been honored to be a speaker for the past 5 years after being on staff for the first one. This year is obviously going to look very different from those previous 6 events, but this virtual event will still be rife with valuable information and great connection opportunities.
This year the âshiny new stuffâ technical sessions that I have always been involved in are all being done by Microsoft Employees which lead to the big question âWhat is left for community members to do?â. Anna Chu & the community team had out backs, as always, giving us an opportunity to submit and be selected to deliver sessions that we felt were valuable to the community in this time.
One of the areas that I have been focused on helping people with over the past 6 months has been how to get a sense of normalcy in this isolated world.
My dudes & I ran a web series bringing people from around the globe together to hear about cool places from awesome speakers who were willing to share their time & their passion for their special places. You can find some of the stories on the Story Telling About Cool Places YouTube channel. I still need to get the rest of the videos uploaded there. #slacker
I spent dozens of hours working with teachers who needed help coming up with how they were going to teach kids in a remote world when they didnât even know how to get started thinking about it.
I also have had dozens of conversations with community friends about my current home office configuration which I continue to tweak, tune, and evolve. My goal is to ensure that I provide myself with a comfortable working environment but to also make my working world low impact on my family while enabling my work to be uninterrupted when required. It is a delicate balance but we have made it work very well.
I am very fortunate in that I have been working in a remote fashion for some period of time since 2005 (yes, I had to go to LinkedIn to remind myself of how long Iâve been doing this for). My âwork-from-homeâ setup has changed dramatically over the years and evolved multiple times as I went from work-from-home to work-from-anywhere and back to work-from-home.
The evolution also happened multiple times because of the changes that have happened in my life over the past 15 years. I went from a single guy in a bachelor house, to a married guy, to a married guy with little kids, and now a married guy with tween-aged kids. Each evolution came with different settings, scenarios I needed to account for, and levels of interaction with others.
This is the first in a series of posts that I will be doing between now and Microsoft Ignite which is happening September 22-24, 2020 online and COMPLETELY FREE. This means that you should be going to the https://ignite.microsoft.com site and registering for the event as soon as you finish reading this, if you havenât already done it.
I am helping moderate a 30 minute table talk called âWorking from home – How are other people doing it?â in the Americas time block with Iasia Brown, Loni French, Matthew Hudson, and Matt Wade on Wednesday September 23rd from 3:45p-4:15p. I am excited to hear what my co-moderators have to say, as well as all the folks from around the community. This blog post series is my way of putting some of my personal tips and tricks from my latest evolution down in a way that I can easily refer people to without monopolizing the live conversation.
I hope that you find this series useful. I will share links to all of the gear, however I am not using affiliate links because I am not looking to profit on my recommendations. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but I prefer to share via Amazon Smile links, which I sincerely hope you all will use to benefit your own favorite organizations. If you havenât set up your Amazon Profile with smile.amazon.com please consider doing so and help your favorite non-profit organization when you buy stuff on Amazon.
Thatâs all for today. I am excited to write this series and would love to hear what you think about each part in the comments below, on Twitter, or via email.
The July 2020 release of Power BI Desktop brings some awesome new functionality with it: integration of external tools in the ribbon! There have been external tools written by community member and tools vendors for quite a while now, but they have never integrated with the product and shown up inside of the Power BI Desktop experience until now.
This is exciting stuff because many of these tools are highly useful today and will continue to grow in importance as the product continues to mature. Microsoft does a great job of advancing its products, far better today than 5 years ago when Power BI first showed up on the scene, but they are never going to be able to do everything. That leaves white space for vendors and community members to contribute.
The first 3 tools that are being made available through the External Tools pane in the ribbon are: ALM Toolkit, DAX Studio, and Tabular Editor. We have been told that Power BI Report Builder will show up in this space eventually as well.
Here is an excerpt from the blog post on the Power BI blog site explaining a bit more about this:
The External Tools ribbon contains buttons for external tools installed on the machine and registered with Power BI Desktop. External tools launched from Power BI Desktop are automatically connected to the Analysis Services engine running behind Power BI Desktop providing a seamless experience for users.
As I said, this is great news so why am I bothering to write a post about something that was clearly covered in the Power BI blog and I talked about on the BIFocal.show podcast? The answer is that I updated my work PC to the July 2020 version of Power BI Desktop using the Microsoft Store method and didn’t get the new External Tools ribbon. I was a bit perplexed.
I checked the Preview features dialog under Options in the Options and settings menu and there was no option for turning it on. I remember that this feature went right to General Availability, so it shouldn’t have shown up there anyway.
Then it hit me: I didn’t have any of the External Tools installed on my work machine yet. I had them installed on my VM that I use for demos and on my home PC rig, but I haven’t used any of them in my day-to-day for work yet (I’ve only been at EY for 4 months now). These are External Tools meaning they are not a part of the product, so logic says that you have to install them separately to get them to show up and why have a tab if there isn’t anything there to see?
Once I installed the tools the Tab showed up without an issue, although I had a few hiccups getting them installed. I decided it was probably a good idea to share my experience installing the tools now that a broader group of people are going to be looking at using them.
Here is my how-to with a few Gotchas along the way. Enjoy!
The walk-through
July 2020 Power BI Desktop
First validate that you are running the July 2020 version of Power BI Desktop. I highly recommend using the Microsoft Store version if you are able to.
Your next step is to download the tool or tools that you want to use from the list I gave above.
SmartScreen tries to protect you from yourself… and malicious code
The first snag that you will likely experience is that the built in Microsoft SmartScreen protection is going to block one or more of the downloads.
If you chose to go forward, as I did, you need to click on Keep and then go to Downloads.
Warning! Consult a PC physician if virus symptoms arise. Computers can’t get COVID though…
You will need to expand the Show more option and choose to Keep anyway so that you can execute the msi package.
CAVEAT: I am not advocating you install random stuff on your computer. I am showing you what I did, as I personally trust the folks who created these packages. Hopefully they will get signed certificates at some point, but today they are unsigned and that is why this happens.
Finally you are ready to execute the installer and you get this message:
Ok… now you start rethinking what you are doing, not just with this installation but your whole life… maybe I should have been a painter or a chef?
You finally decide that you really do want to install these super useful tools so you go back to the installer msi and right click then choose to Install as Administrator.
Then you get this screen:
I turned around 3 times & spit, splashed holy water, & fed a chicken… do I Run anyway?
This time you get the option to Run anyway. If you choose to move forward at this point, like I did, you will walk through the normal Install Wizard screens for the software as you would for any other commercial product. Once complete you are ready to go with the tools.
You will need to restart Power BI Desktop if you happen to still have it open and then…
Tada!
You now have the External Tools section of the Ribbon! Congrats.
If you did everything I listed above you should see this:
SO PRETTY!
Your experience may differ from mine, as my own experiences did working across 3 different machines with different levels of access. The scenario I outlined above was in my most restrictive environment and therefore I felt was the most reasonable one to document. There was a step I didn’t document about how I had to elevate permissions differently because of corporate restrictions on my work PC. Every company is going to be different so I left my company specific step out.
If you have one or some of the External Tools showing up but not all, you may have older versions of the tools installed that need to be updated or you might find that are wondering why don’t have all 3 of the tools showing up you should go watching Adam Saxton‘s Guy in a Cube video explaining that scenario is super useful. If nothing else you should see how he adds in Patrick Leblanc‘s NoSums tool into the Ribbon. That was insane amazing and Patrick is super stoked about it.
Hope you found this useful. Stay safe & healthy folks!
I am excited to announce that I was recently accepted as a Microsoft Regional Director! While I have been aware of the program for a long time, but I had never thought seriously about pursuing participation until this past year. Stephanie Donahue & I had many discussions when she joined the program and based upon her experience I decided I would accept her offer to nominate me and pursue joining the Regional Director (RD) ranks. I am truly appreciative for her friendship & insights.
In my last post I shared the update about what has been happening in our world this year and my application for RD was a part of what was going on just at the same time as everything else at that time. To call it chaotic would be an understatement. As I was going through the application process my family asked me âWhat is the Regional Director Program?â. Happily there is a website, https://rd.microsoft.com, that gives good information about the program.
Here is the gist from the site:
The Regional Director Program provides Microsoft leaders with the customer insights and real-world voices it needs to continue empowering developers and IT professionals with the world’s most innovative and impactful tools, services, and solutions.
Regional Directors act in a non-paid advisory capacity with Microsoft. On an ongoing basis, RDs are asked to participate in scheduled strategic feedback sessions with Microsoft senior leadership teams. Because of their community leadership positions, passion, commitment to technology and business excellence, RDs have a regular outlet where they can express real-time customer and community feedback directly with Microsoft engineers and the senior leadership team, including Satya.
I am looking forward to engaging in this program. We had our introduction call today and started seeing engagement on the distribution lists tonight. It is a very warm and welcoming group of 205 RDs & Microsoft folks. I look forward to meeting the other RDs and gaining a broader set of insights from those relationships.
Tomorrow is MVP Renewal day. It is very much a Forrest Gump kinda day because you never know what you are going to get. I have been fortunate to be a part of the program since January 1st, 2014 and I hope to continue for many years to come. The RD program is a completely different thing with itâs own requirements and requirements for renewal, but happily it is a 2 year term so I wonât worry about that for a while. For now I am going to sit back and enjoy the excitement of the new program.
Thanks to everyone who supported my nomination, all those who continue to help guide me toward new adventures, and my community family that I would do anything for. I am eternally grateful to all of you.
When I last wrote an update on my blog I shared news about life changes in the Himmelstein household and described how I was looking forward to making deliberate decisions about our future. Little did I know how the world was going to change between then and now.
The impact of COVID-19 on our lives has been profound. We were in Houston at the start of the dudes Spring Break at the Rodeo when the Mayor shut it down. We came home to San Antonio and the city started to go on lockdown. The school district shutdown the schools and the dudes did not go back after Spring Break. We celebrated my birthday on the back deck with takeout in a socially distanced way with my Parents but we had decided that we wouldnât even hug because of the potential risks.
The next morning I accepted an offer for employment knowing that my on-boarding would be 100% remote and the beginning of this new career path would be a trailblazing experience not only for me as an employee, but for the company as it transitioned from an in-person world to being remote.
That same night my Bubby passed away. While it wasnât a shock we had to come to grips with the fact that we were not going to be able to be in person to bury her or mourn her passing in the way that our faith has always prescribed.
We attended her funeral virtually and were able to gather as a family nightly to take part in services so that we could collectively say the Mournerâs Kaddish. I started my new career with EY the next day as a Senior Manager in Financial Services Tax Technology and Transformation.
I know life is a crazy ride sometimes, but everything I just told you about happened in the span of 12 days. My on boarding at EY was a blur and I immediately got right to work. It has been just over 3 months now and I am loving what I am doing, architecting Power Platform & Collaboration solutions for our customers. I have an amazing team of people that I get to work with on a day to day basis and we are coming up with amazing ways to modernize traditional business processes using the latest and greatest technology.
The world has been upside-down for all of 2020, but there have been a few bright spots. The pain that we are feeling from isolation, racism, personal loss, and the toxic politics have just compounded the situation. We strive to make the best of all of things and I am proud that I joined a company that has taken a hard line anti-racism stance. It feels right to be a part of discussions that arenât comfortable right now and learning how to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Sounds very paradoxical, but it is what is needed right now.
I spend time listening to peopleâs experiences, their pain over the systemic problems in our society, and their ideas for how we can try to change the world. I am trying to digest what I hear and ask questions so that I can try to be a part of a solution rather than perpetuating the problem with my own ignorance.
Before 2020 we never sat down with our Dudes (how I refer to my sons in the plural) and talked about politics, current events, or racial issues. For years I have abhorred the US News media because of their unbalanced story telling and lack of truth. I refused to watch the News on TV because of this, but since the murder of George Floyd & the way that our Mayor & County judge have handled the pandemic updates we are watching daily. We are talking to the Dudes about what has happened and what is happening.
We are seeing the world change in front of our eyes and struggling daily with how best to handle it. I know that sitting silently and not talking about what is going is not something that I am going to do any longer. I donât need to hold a picket sign and march to make a difference. I am going to make sure that I raise the next generation of my family to be Dugmaot (role models in hebrew) and good human beings that care for others.
This brings me to tomorrow. Poppaâs Yartzeit (anniversary of his death) is on Monday, so my father & uncles decided to do an Unveiling for both Bubby & Poppa together. If you are wondering what these things are you can read up on them here: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-tombstone-the-unveiling-and-visiting-the-grave/. Unfortunately because of COVID-19 we will not be attending in person, but will be able to witness the ceremony remotely. It is a reflective evening as I think back on the lives of my Grandparents.
One thing that the Dudes always loved about going to visit GG (what they called my Bubby) & Poppa was that during the visit we would eventually go out in the back of the house and Poppa would take the Dudes fishing. They have been asking when we could go fishing for a few months now, knowing that Poppa had sent me home from one of our many visits with fishing gear. We are going to a lake this coming week to do some fishing to honor Poppa & Bubbyâs memory. Ok… more Poppaâs memory than Bubbyâs because she was never a fan of fishing, but she did love her Fisherman.
I took Max with me today when I needed to get some of the supplies for the trip and we had a conversation with my Mom. She was going through and watching old reel to reel movies from her parents and we ended up mentioning inheritance. After we got off the phone I explained to Max that I used to tell my Grandparents, as I tell my Parents still to this day, that I want them to spend every last cent they have having adventures and making memories with us. Max looked at me and said âI would rather have a pile of memories as my inheritance than a pile of money any dayâ.
Isolation sucks. As you can tell from the above craziness that has been 2020 we have missed out on so very much this year because of the risks associate with the virus. At the end of the day we are doing what we need to in order to keep safe and healthy, but I keep coming back to a comment my Mom always makes to me when I am leaving to go anywhere that I am driving away from her. She always says âDrive safe.â to which I respond âI always doâ and she says âitâs not you Iâm really worried about, its all the crazies you will be sharing the road with that make me worry.â There are tons of memes out there around life in the time of COVID-19 but the simple statement that I hope people keep in mind that reminds me of that frequent conversation with Mom: If you hate wearing a mask, you are really not going to like the ventilator. If not for yourself, do for those that you share the world with, you self-centered narcissistic asshole. (I may have added that last line myself)
I recognize that this post is long, rambling, and likely doesnât make a ton of sense. Letâs see if I can sum it up: Standing by in silence with what is happening in todayâs world is failing. Even though we remain in isolation we are still doing what we can to educate ourselves, help others, and bring light into the world. My grandparents left behind a wonderful legacy and I intend to make sure that it lives on to do good in the world for a long time to come.
Thatâs all for tonight. Stay safe, stay healthy, and wear a mask.
The dawn of a new decade brings some welcome change to the
Himmelstein house. In early December I left Rackspace and the timing couldnât
be better. I had been planning to take time off for the remainder of the year
to spend time with Jill & the boys, so this allowed me to do so completely
uninterrupted. At any other time of year I would have likely jumped right out
and started searching for a new job & not slowed down to enjoy the time
off. Given that most companies go on minimal staffing for the last half of
December / early January, I decided to hold off until now to begin the quest
for my next adventure.
Rackspace was wonderful for our family for almost 5 years.
It brought us back to Texas which has been a terrific life changing move. I got
to experience building & managing a global business from the ground up and
I got to work with some AMAZING humans & learned more than I ever expected
in the process. In addition, while we loved living in New England, being back
in Texas has allowed the boys to get to know their Grandparents more than
regular Facetime sessions & twice a year visit ever could.
During the course of the past 5 years I expanded my skills
into new areas from being an Architect & Practice Director for SharePoint
to include helping bring multiple Products and managed services to market, educating
& driving teams of sellers to put customers in better positions to be
successful, leading strategy for customers long term technological &
business futures, and leveraging data to make business decisions that chart the
course for success in areas that had previously been improperly managed. I will
always be grateful for the time I spent at Rackspace.
The big question for me is: What comes next? I am still
figuring that out to be honest. Over the past 5 years, I have been excited to
delve into both Power BI and Microsoft 365 from both the management and
technical sides. This leaves me with many options to explore as I decide what
will feed my passion for this crazy technology world moving forward, and for
the first time in my adult life I have the gift of time to do so.
If you are interested in having a conversation about
something that you think I should be considering, please drop me a note and
letâs chat!
I did a thing tonight that I swore I would never do. I used the “Publish to web” feature in Power BI. I had a good reason and I followed the guidelines I always tell people to follow, but I still feel a bit icky about it.
I was writing a document for a customer this afternoon and once again I ran into a situation where I wished that I could have the old Service Description Excel workbook that Microsoft used to put out. It was a really cool pivot table that allowed you to quickly see what features aligned to which Office 365 & Server based licenses. Unfortunately they stopped publishing it a few years ago. It is a giant pain in the ass to drill through all of the features across all of the SKUs to make sure that you are giving customers the best recommendations when it comes to licensing.
To be honest what I really missed was the ability to use conditional formatting on the thing and create a REALLY easy to consume version of the document for “at a glance” use. The goal is to be able to look at the features list and see which Microsoft SKUs they are available in.
This afternoon I ran across a nice table that does just that in the Office 365 Service Description part of Docs.microsoft.com for SharePoint, but the layout makes it relatively unusable. I got excited thinking that this was the answer to my old Excel workbook and immediately attempted to copy & paste into Excel, which failed miserably because of formatting. Then I got mad. I swore a ton. I called and yelled at Mark Rackley because that is one of the things I do when I get mad at SharePoint stuff. I believe that my last words on that call were “going to have to go PBID on their shit to get what I want”. Sorry for the colorful language gentle reader, but I warned you I was mad and swearing…
I grabbed the Web connector and pulled in the data that I wanted, wrote a bunch of queries, unpivoted some columns, hacked away for about 2 hours and ended up with a passable version of my old favorite tool. Then I went a bit nuts and decided to do the same thing for the Office 365 Platform Service Description which is considerably more complex and lengthy.
Finally I created a new Power BI Workspace and published it to the web. I still feel icky, but hopefully people will find this useful and that will make up for it. I have embedded the report below or you can visit https://jasehimm.online/servicedescriptions to access it directly.
In the coming days I plan to add more to this. Let me know if you feel this is useful & what you would like to see added in the comments below or you can tweet at me @jasehimm.
