Tag: Power BI

The new Paginated Report visual is here!

Last Friday Microsoft put out the Power BI June 2021 Feature Summary which included the much awaited Paginated Report visual. I’ve been waiting for this rather impatiently for the past few months and am thrilled that it is finally here. Read Chris Finlan‘s full post about the Paginated Report visual here: Paginated report visual for Power BI reports is now available in public preview.

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!

Using the Paginated Report visual in the Power BI Report

Setting up Power BI Desktop

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 “Paginated report visual”. We will be required to restart Power BI Desktop once you are done with this step.

Adding the Paginated Report Visual

Now that Power BI Desktop is reopened we will find the Paginated Report Visual in the Visualizations pane.

Once we click the visual icon it will drop into the open space on the canvas, and we can resize it to your desired size.

Configuring the Paginated Report Visual

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 “Set Parameters” button and change the parameters from the “use default” option to the specific Power BI fields that we want to use. Once that is done, we click the “See Report” 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.

Using the Paginated Report Visual

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 “Apply Changes” 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 “Auto-apply filters” as a toggle. We will only see “Auto-ap…” as the default layout of the Visualizations pane is small. Once toggled we will see the “Apply changes” 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.

If you want to find the full white paper please feel free to click here to access it.

June 28, 2021
Working from home – How are other people doing it? – Part 1

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 “shiny new stuff” technical sessions that I have always been involved in are all being done by Microsoft Employees which lead to the big question “What is left for community members to do?”. 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 didn’t 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 I’ve been doing this for). My “work-from-home” 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 haven’t already done it.

I am helping moderate a 30 minute table talk called “Working from home – How are other people doing it?” 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.

Immediately after the table talk I will be going live with Adam Saxton & Patrick Leblanc from Guy in a Cube and John White, my co-host of the BIFocal Podcast, on the Guy in a Cube YouTube channel to discuss all of the Power BI announcements that have happened at Microsoft Ignite. You can find us here: https://guyinacu.be/ignite2020

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 haven’t 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.

That’s 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.

September 13, 2020
Office 365 Service Description Power BI report

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.

November 14, 2019
6 more tips & tricks for Microsoft Ignite 2019
I wrote an article back in 2016 about things to think about for Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta. I decided that it is time to refresh that with some things I have learned over the years and specifically some learnings from the past four Microsoft Ignites, many TechEds & SharePoint Conferences, etc.

Wear comfortable shoes

The Orange County Convention Center, affectionately known as the OCCC, is HUGE. You are going walk a ton. In previous years I have averaged around 18k steps per day. Wearing comfortable shoes is CRITICAL. Even though the extended forecast puts the highs in the low 80s (upper 20s in Celsius) with lows in the upper 60s (upper teens in Celsius) personally I will be avoiding sandals and going with well supported tennis shoes all week.

Plan backup sessions

There are several reasons for doing this. Let’s get the ugly one out of the way first: you just want to get out of the session you are in. At some point it’s going to happen. You will be sitting there thinking to yourself “I want to get out of here”. Not every presenter is going to hit home for you. Maybe the topic is too deep, to narrow, not deep enough, or you just don’t like the presenter’s style.

On behalf of all Speaker’s at all conference everywhere: PLEASE GET UP AND GO. If you do it politely & quietly most presenters won’t even notice that you are going. Do not sit there miserable wishing you could leave and wasting your time & money being in a session you are not enjoying. Nobody wants that. You will be unhappy, give the speaker bad session scores, and not get anything out of that time block.

Instead, make sure that you have backup sessions ready to go so that you can jump out of session and go to another.
- The session you wanted to get into is full. You registered. You expected there would be a seat for you as a result, but fire code says they cannot let you in or the theater is just overflowing. This is a very real scenario at this event. One of my theater sessions has over 1500 people registered for it. The theaters are on the expo hall floor and do not hold that many people. Last year they had seating for about 100. If you walk up to one of these sessions late it may be time to jump to a backup session.
- The session you wanted to go to is ¾ of a mile from the last session you just went to. There is no easy way for you to get there without sprinting across the OCCC and the seas of people don’t make that easy.
- Almost all the sessions are being live streamed & recorded. Putting multiple sessions on your calendar can help you later when you want to go find sessions that you want to watch. You are already reading all the session abstracts; you may as well build your backlog to watch later.
Engage in the Hub & show floor

There are 25 rows of vendors. The place is massive. That is before you come to the Community areas. You are going to get lost. Make the most of it. Some of the most fun conversations at vendors booth’s I have had over the years are the ones that I just stumbled on because I was lost or just wandering.

Make sure that you spend plenty of time in the Microsoft zones peppering the Product Teams with questions. That’s why they are there. You aren’t bothering them (most of the time). Booth duty at these events I can tell you that it is BORING when no one is there to talk to. You are on a shift with folks that you may know and like, but after the first hour you know how their kids, dog, wife, cat, bird, in-laws, tomato plant, and PTA President are and you want attendees to talk to. They want to talk to you. Bring your questions.

Be sure to find Community Central, the Global Diversity & Inclusion zone, Experts Connect, the Microsoft Store, and the Hub Hangout. This is where you will find people like you who are dying to talk about that geeky thing you just learned about and need to discuss.

Hydrate

This seems intuitive, but every year I run into people who are dehydrated because they are used to a different pace of life than the conference world. They forget that they are in Florida where it is going to be hot, even though it is supposedly almost winter in this hemisphere. Also, it is going to rain every day around 5p. Bring a small umbrella or expect that you are going to get wet. Don’t worry, it will be warm enough that you will dry out relatively quickly.

Be out-of-office (OOO)

We all put up our “Automatic Reply” or OOO message, but how often do we actually follow through on the “I won’t be looking at email during this period of time” statement? Email is accessible everywhere nowadays, so it is hard to ignore. There are some things that you can do to help yourself avoid this black hole that will pull you away from being present at the event. Here is what I am doing:

Boomerang

This is an awesome add-in for Outlook & Outlook on the Web that allows you to pause email delivery into your inbox while turning on an Auto-Responder so that people know that you aren’t seeing their email. This is REALLY handy for when you want to be in the moment without the constant distractions.

The Pro version, if you are lucky enough to be licensed for it, has many other awesome features but sticking with the pause feature on email delivery it allows you to get emails delivered on a schedule, meaning you could get email at 6a, noon, and 6p so that you are able to disposition your email when it is most convenient for you.

Microsoft Flow

I use this anytime I have Automatic Replies turned on. I believe that the OOO message is a social contract that people should respect. If what they are emailing about is truly important enough to get a response while you are OOO or something that they want to make sure sits at the top of the pile for when you return, they should be willing to take 1 extra step.

I put the following in my OOO messages: “You can also forward me your original message and use the subject of “Customer Flagged” and Microsoft Flow will put your email in my priority list to respond to when I look at my email.”

Here is what the Flow looks like:

I submitted this as a template to the Flow Gallery, but I don’t know if or when they will publish it. Check for “Out-of-office message enhancement”.

USB battery pack

This is CRITICAL. Even if you are on the newest, brand new phone that has amazing battery power the OCCC is going to suck the life right out of it. The building is made of concrete and reception is generally mediocre, however your phone is trying desperately to please you by delivering as many bars as it can. This results in rapid battery drain. I have never made it a full day at the OCCC, or most other conference centers like it, without needing a charge up. Wall plugs are at a premium, mostly because people didn’t take the last piece of advice and are sitting on their laptops trying to work instead of engaging. Being portable is key. You still have time to pick up one of these wonderful devices. Here is a link to some options: https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=usb+battery+pack. I am personally partial to the Anker & RAVPower brands as they have served me well in the past.

FYI, I don’t profit from the things I have recommended above. Even the Amazon link is just to the generic AmazonSmile search page. If you don’t know about AmazonSmile please go check it out. It is a way that you can help a charity just by doing the shopping you normally do. There is no impact to you.

Conclusion

This was way more longwinded than I was planning, but hopefully it helps you. There are many posts out there like this that will tell you about parties galore and how to have fun at the event. Go read all of them and drain every ounce of good from the event that you can. It is a crazy, fun, exhausting, massive event.

If you are interested in seeing me at Ignite please check out my profile on the Ignite Speaker Directory at https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/speaker/564517.

Feel free to stop by the Rackspace booth #1631 where the “Rack Gives Back” committee is contributing $1 to the American Heart Association, up to $3000 for the week, for everyone scanned at the Rackspace booth. When you get scanned you will get a badge ribbon like this:

I will be hanging around the booth some, but if you don’t see me there just the Rackers at the booth as they will know how to track me down.

One last thing that we just announced tonight: John White & I are hosting a #MSIgnitePowerPint along with Treb Gatte from Marquee Insights & Adam Saxton from Guy in a Cube at Marlow’s Tavern on Tuesday from 4-6p. In order to attend you need to grab a pin from one of us, so find me at the event!
October 30, 2019
What you should know about SharePoint Conference North America

SharePoint Conference North America (SPCNA) is poised to be the place to be to learn what’s new, next & top of mind from Microsoft. This event will contain the most sessions delivered by Microsoft about Office 365, SharePoint & OneDrive during 2018 and split across 3 main tracks of Developer, ITPro, & Business User.

There are 2 sides to this event that are worthy of note:

1.) Microsoft delivered content
2.) Community delivered content

The Microsoft content is being delivered by the Product teams and will focus on the latest, greatest, bleeding edge features & functionality that they are releasing AND what is still to come. Many of the sessions are roadmap sessions that lay the future foundation for what you can expect to see Microsoft deliver over the next 18 months. Add to that the SPCNA keynote will be headlined by Jeff Teper to start the show and you can be assured of some surprises & fireworks like the SPCs of old.

The Community delivered content, put together by track chairs like me, are focused on what we know you want to learn about how to keep up with the new wave of Office 365 features. Many of the top speakers in the space have been tapped to deliver brand new sessions at SPCNA. The session catalog has been ever evolving as Microsoft slowly drops clues to what they are going to be sharing with us in May.

This will be the first time since 2014 that the SharePoint Community (with the addition of the broader Collab communities of OneDrive & Yammer) is coming together in Vegas the way that we used to for the SharePoint Conference. The message we have heard out of the Microsoft is that they are “All IN” & are “doing this because the people have been demanding that they go back to Vegas to deliver their latest update in person, because the magic is in the Community”.

On a personal note I am lucky to participate in the major conferences in the US, plus some in other parts of the world, and for me this is a cannot miss event. With that said, you can bet your last chip that I will be at SharePoint Fest & SPTechCon this year as well to take part in those unique conferences & engage with the community as I always have. This one event does not define our community, but we hope that as SPC always did in the past, it can provide an additional spark that lights the fire of excitement for the year to come and all the other events that help to strengthen our amazing community.

See you in Las Vegas where I will be delivering a Power BI pre-con with my BIFocal.show co-host John White & a hybrid SharePoint & Office 365 post-con with Neil Hodgkinson, Bill Baer, & Spencer Harbar!

February 12, 2018
The Future of SharePoint is almost here!

Good morning from 34k feet somewhere over New Mexico! I am currently flying out to San Francisco to take part in the Future of SharePoint event tomorrow. I have been lucky enough to have spent time out in Redmond over the past few weeks and have had a chance to see some of what Jeff Teper and the SharePoint Team are going to share with us tomorrow and I can tell you that it is some game changing, super exciting stuff

If you haven’t already registered for the Live Stream you should stop reading and do it right now… I will wait… http://aka.ms/FutureOfSharePoint

Now that you’ve done that we can continue

If you aren’t able to stream the feed for some reason or just want to an up to the second view into what I am thinking about the event, my colleagues Todd Klindt, Randy Drisgill, and John Ross will also be Live Blogging the event on the Rackspace SharePoint site at http://sharepoint.rackspace.com/live-event. You can download a calendar reminder for this here.

Want to keep up with what is trending on Twitter around the event? Check out the Twitter Analytics Power BI dashboard that Dave Feldman, John White & I put together below.

Last night as we were playing with our Twitter Analytics I saw someone tweet the question: “Can the future of SharePoint really live up to all the hype?”. I am hopeful & optimistic for the first time in quite a while that it can, however only time will tell. I for one am betting heavily that it will as I have chosen to tie my career to SharePoint & Office 365. From everything that I have seen from Microsoft recently they are doing 3 things very right in my opinion:

1.) They are listening. Whether it is via User Voice, direct interactions with them, or the telemetry that they are using coming from the service they are listening to what we are telling them with our words and our actions.

2.) They are getting fresh blood into the right seats on the bus and keeping the world moving forward.

3.) They are investing in innovation. This is something that they had stopped for a while, but they are back with a vengeance. There is nothing more exciting in the tech world to me than innovation.

I am excited to see what they have to say tomorrow and I hope you are too. May the 4th be with you!
-jase

May 3, 2016
Announcing the new ITUnity web show: BIFocal

I was sitting in the speaker room at SharePoint Fest Seattle having a Skype chat with John White. We were collaborating on some Business Intelligence content that we could deliver at conferences either together or independently, but still ensure that we were providing a consistent message. At some point during this chat one of us suggested that this amusing & informational back and forth that we were having would make for a pretty decent podcast. Dan Holme, CEO of ITUnity, overheard the comment and said “It would make an even better web show on ITUnity!” Thus an idea was born.

I am excited to announce that a mere 5 months later we are ready to go live with our new monthly web show, BI Focal. We are going to keep you up to date on all of the latest news in the BI space, provide Tips & Tricks, have interesting guests, take viewer questions, and even do some cool demos.

We hope that you will join us for our inaugural show “Select * from Hosts” on January 28th, 2016 at 1:30PM Eastern Time on ITUnity. Check out our promo below:

January 28, 2016