Power BI Reports - Best Practices | Efficiency 365

Power BI is popular. Use these 10 best practices to make useful, insightful and flexible reports.
Avoid common mistakes. Make it easier for yourself and others to understand the data and take appropriate action.
Utilize the power of Power BI to your advantage.
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Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:26 - Who will use the report and How?
00:45 - Don't waste space
01:09 - Minimise Pages
01:31 - Don't use the same chart type as used in Excel report
02:16 - Use custom visuals only when necessary
02:59 - Notice every Field Well and Formatting Option
04:44 - Create maps for geographical data
05:25 - Educate the target audience
06:05 - Check how others use the reports you send to them
06:34 - Think of the purpose of the report and improve it
06:57 - Summary
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Production
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AI based captions: videoindexer.ai (Microsoft service)

[@rajathmk]

Would love to see a video on the 4 unique Microsoft visuals with use cases for each once! I couldn't find much info on some of them but realized they might be exactly what I was looking for!

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @rajathmk Sure. Coming soon. Check out my popular Excel videos How to enter and edit Excel Formulas - Back to Basics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKWnnYKIgdKdoqc Excel Green Marks - Error Checking - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jpavpZ-wmZ6fiLs Excel Best Practices - Part 1 of 3 - Data Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKPCYpuXa8xposU Excel Best Practices - Part 2 of 3 - Formulas - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oavCq3Ssgq6Bd80 Excel Best Practices - Part 3 of 3 - Analytics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gH-1ZqyulLWaaqM 10 Excel Settings You Must CHANGE! - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rInVo4uagN59fM0 Automatic data clean up with Excel Flash Fill - kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGTTkKuVob2HlcU Instant Excel Audit, Comparison and Analysis - Inquire - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXXHp4iQrbSIn9U Six powerful Excel Navigation Shortcuts - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIOQqoCYfLWka5I Handle millions of rows in Excel - Slow to fast - kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2TLaKWIqLF5bbs Convert crosstab to tabular - Unpivot - Excel Power Query - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4XXgKeQfZKhhK8 Cheers. Doc

[@vsrinivasan574]

Thank you very much, You are my guru. Your words Computer should work for you and not you work for the computer - have brought a lot of change to me.

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @vsrinivasan574 Check out my other best practices videos as well. Efficient Tasks Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rH2poYqMm7qZh5o Task Apps Comparison: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jJq6e3ywgrWEkMk Teams Meeting - Agenda, Action Points, Notes - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oWHXaZKjg9CAetk Microsoft Teams - 15 Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jWm4l6uVr9N-rqs OneDrive Best Practices Part 1 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/emi9o5mmnbxnrNE Part 2 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/pHfbZ4yHrchgmJY Smart and Effective Email - 5 powerful ways - kzbin.info/www/bejne/bH-od4aDpq2ah6c Outlook Calendar Best Practices : Part 1 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/favWgqGbmM90h9E and Part 2 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/ppLHfHturthoedU OneNote - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o16XcoxnmLKcbtU Microsoft 365 Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oYemkIyZgZqCmLc Cheers. Doc.

[@ryan19899]

Excellent points Doc

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @ryan19899 Check out my other best practices videos as well. Efficient Tasks Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rH2poYqMm7qZh5o Task Apps Comparison: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jJq6e3ywgrWEkMk Teams Meeting - Agenda, Action Points, Notes - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oWHXaZKjg9CAetk Microsoft Teams - 15 Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jWm4l6uVr9N-rqs OneDrive Best Practices Part 1 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/emi9o5mmnbxnrNE Part 2 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/pHfbZ4yHrchgmJY Smart and Effective Email - 5 powerful ways - kzbin.info/www/bejne/bH-od4aDpq2ah6c Outlook Calendar Best Practices : Part 1 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/favWgqGbmM90h9E and Part 2 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/ppLHfHturthoedU OneNote - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o16XcoxnmLKcbtU Microsoft 365 Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oYemkIyZgZqCmLc Cheers. Doc.

[@jkumar8590]

As usual excellent Dr. Please make a separate video on Sandance, Timeline, Charticulstor etc.

[@efficiency365]

Yes. Working on those. Charticulator is now open source. MS is no longer maintaining it. But I will create a video soon.

[@luceroemperatrizsovero7108]

Yes please. Great video!

[@jimmyfal]

I came across your teachings in my newfound passion for learning about DATA in general. My fascination has led me to learning to aggregate data and visualizing data. I felt I should learn more about Excel before jumping into Power BI, and this has been the right path. I am now familiar with Power Query and Merging Querys and loading large data into Data Models for better performance. Now that I have done that, I wish to practice with the same data set in Power BI. Co-Pilot has been my teacher all along, and yourself as well. I was looking for the type of data I was dealing with in your videos but did not come across a lot in this department. Maybe your audience would find it useful. My practice project was to put temperature sensors in different rooms of my house and compare outside temps to the crawl space under my house and how often my space heaters would come on at colder times of the year. I learned to export the data from the sensors to .csv files, emailing the data to myself, downloading the .csv data to individual folders, loading the data into Power Query, merging the data into a merged query that had each rooms temperature as a column, and the commons dates and times as the rows. I then learned to group the dates by month, day, hour, minute; so that the charts would contain that info OVERLAYED in a line chart for comparison; and I even grouped by the minutes of the hour so that the charts would look more granular when sliced down. I ran into issues with slicers and sorting but put that on the back burner because I could not figure it out, seems that Data Models don’t have the option to use custom lists for sorting. It would be great if you could take an example like this of temperature data from 3 or 4 different rooms and show the PROPER way to combine these individual .csv data sets into an overlayed chart in either excel or power bi or both, without a total degradation in performance. A LOT of folks deal with temperature data, and I don’t see a lot of content on KZbin explaining the issue of using slicers to get this data down to the minute and in the correct sort order. My hourly slicers were out of order, it's just a detail but very annoying. Just a suggestion! Anyway, the temperature sensors put out data as Date, Time, and temperature by the day, hour, minute. And the data sets get way too large to manage in Excel. I only have 3 months’ worth of data, and it would be neat to know the correct way to continue to aggregate this information daily into my charts, without waiting for Excel to finish what its calculating as the data sets are pretty large. Currently over 100,000 rows for each column. Thanks, I am a HUGE fan of your channel. - JF

[@efficiency365]

Thanks for the detailed feedback and information. I will certainly work on creating a video around this use case. Here are some suggestions based upon your inputs. 1. In Excel, do not import the data in Table. Choose the Load TO option to import in Data Model. Performance will increase, file size will decrease. See this video for details - kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2TLaKWIqLF5bbs 2. For multiple files - ongoing consolidation, use the folder approach. 3. Explore 3D map in Excel. Here you can actually put the floor plan of your house and plot data on top of it. Here is a video showing how to do it. kzbin.info/www/bejne/rHWmYX1jhr6glck Cheers. Doc.

[@jimmyfal]

Thanks for listening. To be clear, my largest performance issue seems to be when I refresh for new data after copying the daily csv files into a folder that is then loaded into the data model, the Pivot Table takes to refresh 4 columns of temperature data. Livingroom, Bedroom, Crawl Space, and Outside Temperatures. The Pivot table is 4 columns of merged data; DATE (grouped down to month, day, hour) - then each column of temp data. 42 thousand rows in each column, and those rows would be much more if I ungrouped the hour group into minutes, which I do not need. At this point I have slicers for month, day, and hours of the day, and the hours of the day I cannot get into numerical order. And because my .csv files often overlap by date and time, I always remove duplicates at the end of each Query. After learning to do all this in Excel, I was thinking it might be better to now do this in Power BI to increase performance? Anyway, it's a great exercise for all of this as I proceed to other data projects for practice purposes. I never knew Data could be so addicting, and I am also passionate about an efficient workflow, your channel is perfect for all of this. Thanks again. @@efficiency365

[@efficiency365]

Hi. Sorry for the delayed reply. Import the data into Data Model. Then create Pivots and Slicers. Everything should work much faster. Power BI is also an option. It also uses the same Data Model as Excel. So technically, from a data handling point of view, no difference. Of course Power BI will has much better visualizations. But the floor map is easier to produce with Excel 3D Map, as mentioned earlier.

[@mohdmuzammil3059]

Yes please make sure you that your coming with video on those all visuals you mentioned here as u did ribbon chart video. Thanksgiving

[@efficiency365]

Thanks. Coming soon.

[@mattsnow2376]

Can you make a custom video on the custom visuals you discussed? I learned something today about some variation of the ribbon chart-that was very helpful Dr. N

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @mattsnow2376 Working on it. Coming soon. Check out my popular Excel videos How to enter and edit Excel Formulas - Back to Basics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKWnnYKIgdKdoqc Excel Green Marks - Error Checking - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jpavpZ-wmZ6fiLs Excel Best Practices - Part 1 of 3 - Data Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKPCYpuXa8xposU Excel Best Practices - Part 2 of 3 - Formulas - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oavCq3Ssgq6Bd80 Excel Best Practices - Part 3 of 3 - Analytics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gH-1ZqyulLWaaqM 10 Excel Settings You Must CHANGE! - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rInVo4uagN59fM0 Automatic data clean up with Excel Flash Fill - kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGTTkKuVob2HlcU Instant Excel Audit, Comparison and Analysis - Inquire - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXXHp4iQrbSIn9U Six powerful Excel Navigation Shortcuts - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIOQqoCYfLWka5I Handle millions of rows in Excel - Slow to fast - kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2TLaKWIqLF5bbs Convert crosstab to tabular - Unpivot - Excel Power Query - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4XXgKeQfZKhhK8 Cheers. Doc

[@mattsnow2376]

That video on Sanddance was outstanding. I shared this with my CFO and told him to check it out. Thanks again. Appreciate all your work on producing this content. Are you planning on writing a second edition to your book? @@efficiency365

[@efficiency365]

Thanks Matt. Yes. Planning a second edition. Due to AI too many things are changing too fast. Therefore, waiting for it to stabilize it a bit. Especially the Copilot feature set. Happy and Efficient New Year. Doc.

[@zalakparikh320]

I love watching your videos ❤... Great way to explain very complex things... Hats off to you sir 🙏🙏🙏... I am facing an issue in power bi... When I am exporting my report to power bi which has graphs and tables going beyond the screen those graphs and tables are partially visible in pdf, can you tell me how to solve this problem?

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @zalakparikh320 Right click on the PDF - Open With - Choose App - Word (only once) - Edit in Word - adjust tables - save as PDF. Check out my popular Excel videos How to enter and edit Excel Formulas - Back to Basics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKWnnYKIgdKdoqc Excel Green Marks - Error Checking - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jpavpZ-wmZ6fiLs Excel Best Practices - Part 1 of 3 - Data Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKPCYpuXa8xposU Excel Best Practices - Part 2 of 3 - Formulas - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oavCq3Ssgq6Bd80 Excel Best Practices - Part 3 of 3 - Analytics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gH-1ZqyulLWaaqM 10 Excel Settings You Must CHANGE! - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rInVo4uagN59fM0 Automatic data clean up with Excel Flash Fill - kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGTTkKuVob2HlcU Instant Excel Audit, Comparison and Analysis - Inquire - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXXHp4iQrbSIn9U Six powerful Excel Navigation Shortcuts - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIOQqoCYfLWka5I Handle millions of rows in Excel - Slow to fast - kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2TLaKWIqLF5bbs Convert crosstab to tabular - Unpivot - Excel Power Query - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4XXgKeQfZKhhK8 Cheers. Doc

[@Oggielectric]

Your video are awesome. Thank you. I own a small business and I’m trying to find a way to get demographic information by ZIP Code. I know I can key 🔑 in from but that doesn't seem effecent. Can Power BI or Power Query do this?

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @Oggielectric What type of demographic data do you need? You should find itt downloadable from some web site. Government web sites also provide lot of data for download. Check out my popular Excel videos How to enter and edit Excel Formulas - Back to Basics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKWnnYKIgdKdoqc Excel Green Marks - Error Checking - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jpavpZ-wmZ6fiLs Excel Best Practices - Part 1 of 3 - Data Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKPCYpuXa8xposU Excel Best Practices - Part 2 of 3 - Formulas - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oavCq3Ssgq6Bd80 Excel Best Practices - Part 3 of 3 - Analytics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gH-1ZqyulLWaaqM 10 Excel Settings You Must CHANGE! - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rInVo4uagN59fM0 Automatic data clean up with Excel Flash Fill - kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGTTkKuVob2HlcU Instant Excel Audit, Comparison and Analysis - Inquire - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXXHp4iQrbSIn9U Six powerful Excel Navigation Shortcuts - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIOQqoCYfLWka5I Handle millions of rows in Excel - Slow to fast - kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2TLaKWIqLF5bbs Convert crosstab to tabular - Unpivot - Excel Power Query - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4XXgKeQfZKhhK8 Cheers. Doc

[@ryan19899]

Please make videos on SandDance, Timeline Storyteller, Card Browser and Charticulator. I keep hearing about Charticulator from people but there isn't a lot of resources on the internet for me to learn. Do cover a little on M language as well. It is such a struggle for me. I have been told that the PowerQuery user interface covers 90 percent of all you need. but things like rolling calendar, data scraping multiple pages, etc require M code tweaking. So I need to understand the basics of M.

[@efficiency365]

Thanks @ryan19899 MS visuals videos coming soon. DO NOT try scraping using Power Query. Use Power Automate Desktop. It is a powerful and free RPA tool. Check out my popular Excel videos How to enter and edit Excel Formulas - Back to Basics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKWnnYKIgdKdoqc Excel Green Marks - Error Checking - Best Practices - kzbin.info/www/bejne/jpavpZ-wmZ6fiLs Excel Best Practices - Part 1 of 3 - Data Management - kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKPCYpuXa8xposU Excel Best Practices - Part 2 of 3 - Formulas - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oavCq3Ssgq6Bd80 Excel Best Practices - Part 3 of 3 - Analytics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gH-1ZqyulLWaaqM 10 Excel Settings You Must CHANGE! - kzbin.info/www/bejne/rInVo4uagN59fM0 Automatic data clean up with Excel Flash Fill - kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGTTkKuVob2HlcU Instant Excel Audit, Comparison and Analysis - Inquire - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXXHp4iQrbSIn9U Six powerful Excel Navigation Shortcuts - kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIOQqoCYfLWka5I Handle millions of rows in Excel - Slow to fast - kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2TLaKWIqLF5bbs Convert crosstab to tabular - Unpivot - Excel Power Query - kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4XXgKeQfZKhhK8 Cheers. Doc

[@ryan19899]

@@efficiency365 Fair enough. I have data scraped with PowerAutomate before and I found it really easy to use. My thinking was that scraping from PowerQuery would save the data directly in the data model and hence there would be no row limitations. PowerAutomate saves scraped data in an Excel spreadsheet which has row limitations. Is there any workaround in PowerAutomate?

[@efficiency365]

Understood. In that case Power Automate makes sense. Check the licensing though. Adding a row directly to data model may require Pro license. (I have not checked this.)

[@ryan19899]

@@efficiency365 Doc. Actually I ran into a problem with PowerAutomate(PA) while scraping multiple pages. It just captures the first web page. I am taking a break from PA. Meanwhile, I found out how to scrape with PowerQuery by creating a custom function. The entire process takes only 3 steps and I am able to scrape any number of pages.