Tag: power bi

What is the Power BI service

Posted on by DevPaulC
If you are just starting with Power BI you might be confused of all the Power BI products you encounter. Power BI Service Power BI Desktop Power BI mobile app The good news is, they are all part of the same product but they perform different functions. Click on them to find out what purpose they serve Power BI Service Microsoft calls Power BI service the web portal where all your Workspaces, Dashboards, Reports and Datasets are stored. To access the Power BI Service go to powerbi.microsoft.com and login with your Microsoft account. Based on your subscription, you would...read more

What is Power BI Desktop

Posted on by DevPaulC
Power BI Desktop If you look in the Microsoft Store you will find two applications that you can install on your Windows PC. One is Power BI Desktop and the other is Power BI Mobile. Install the Power BI Desktop if you are planning to create reports in your organization. All Power BI products (Service, Desktop and Mobile) are used with the same Power BI Licence you have. Power BI Desktop is a Desktop application similar with Excel in some ways. It installs on your computer and you can import data, transform data using formulas, merge data, create data...read more

Power BI Error: Information is needed in order to combine data

Posted on by DevPaulC
I had this happen to me on a dataset that was refreshing OK in the Power BI Desktop application but not refreshing in the service. The service was giving the error: "Information is needed in order to combine data" The dataset was a very simple combination of 2 tables. The 2 tables were a result of 2 API calls done with an API key on a cloud website. Error The error "Information is needed in order to combine data" was only happening on the Power BI service. When I was trying to refresh the dataset, it would not do...read more

Power BI – Filter SQL Data before import

Posted on by DevPaulC
Sometimes you need to filter the source data before loading into POWER BI Desktop. If you have a large SQL database with millions of records and you only need the records in the past few days it is not efficient to pull all the data and to filter it after. It takes a long time and it increases the Power BI service load. So here is how you do it. Step 1 Get Data from SQL server database and click Connect Step 2. Type in your Server Name and Database and click on Advanced Options Enter an SQL Statement...read more