English Posts Archive

Power BI: Referencing Theme Colors Directly in Visuals (pbip + visual.json)

Even though Power BI’s color picker doesn’t offer Sentiment colors (Good/Bad/Neutral) and Divergent colors (Min/Mid/Max), you can bind visual properties directly to these semantic color tokens. The trick: save your report as a Power BI Project (.pbip), open the visual.json of the respective visual, and replace hard-coded hex values with the desired color codes (e.g., good, bad, neutral, minColor, midColor, maxColor). From that point on, your theme controls the colors centrally, without manual recoloring in the UI.

Portable Power BI Dashboard Templates with Fabric Notebooks (PoC)

How can we make great Power BI dashboards portable instead of rewiring them for every target model? In this Proof of Concept, I demonstrate an approach where a Fabric Notebook with semPy parameterizes and programmatically re-binds field references. This allows a dashboard template to be rolled out to a different semantic model with minimal manual effort. The outcome is less a one-off report and more a small dashboard factory.

From Decimal Hours Back to Conventional Time: Dynamic Formatting in DAX

In yesterday’s blog post, I explained how to use Power Query to convert conventional time formats like „25:15“ into decimal hours, making them easier to calculate within Power BI. Today, I’d like to share an idea for using DAX’s dynamic formatting to display these decimal hour values back in a conventional time format.

Time Transformation in Power Query: From Conventional Time Format to Decimal Hours

Today, I want to share a simple yet practical solution from a client meeting. Perhaps you’ll face a similar challenge one day, and this solution could help you resolve it efficiently.

Fun with Flags – Country Emojis as Data Labels in Power BI

Sometimes, a seemingly straightforward request brings a fascinating technical challenge. Recently, an old friend expressed the wish to display country flags as symbols on the bars in a stacked bar chart. Initially, this idea seemed a bit humorous, but I was intrigued by the technical challenge. In this post, I’ll show how I fulfilled this wish using country emojis and a special font—and the hurdles involved in the process.

Reference Power BI theme colors in DAX

Did you know that you can refer to the Divergent colors of the theme in DAX? ?
Maybe I’ve seen it somewhere, but I can’t remember and it’s hard to find information about it on the internet.

How to use multiple Power BI Desktop profiles

Those who work in several Power BI tenants surely know the problem. For each tenant, you have to sign out and sign in again in the Power BI Desktop. If the same connectors, such as the Business Central connector, are used, the logon data must also be changed each time. How cool would it be if you could start Power BI Desktop with different profiles, which brings me to my little batch script idea.

Calculate ISO 8601 Calendar Week in Power Query with SQL Query Folding

If you search the internet for a calculation of the ISO calendar week in Power Query, you will often find a Custom Function that does the job. But unfortunately the Custom Function interrupts the query folding for SQL data sources, which mostly slows down the loading process. In this post I provide a solution that also supports query folding for SQL data sources.

Power BI – UK User Group: Exploring the Power BI Datamarts

On 18.08.2022 I was a guest speaker at the Power BI – UK User Group. There we explored the new Power BI Datamarts together. If you missed the event, you can find the recording here. Have fun watching it.

Manchester Power BI User Group: Exploring the Power BI Datamarts

On 28.07.2022 I was a guest speaker at the Manchester Power BI User Group. There we explored the new Power BI Datamarts together. If you missed the event, you can find the recording here. Have fun watching it.