My Journey with Power BI

Advanced Elements is not an intuitive description, that's why I'm going to show you what I'm talking about directly. For my recent project, I've decided to create my own theme for the report. When I was exploring Customize Theme tab, I have come up with the Advanced section. While text, visuals, page, and filter pane sections are self-explanatory, this advanced section seemed quite enigmatic to me. What are the first-level elements? Or the others? I think Microsoft agrees with me upon being enigmatic because the section comes with "Learn more" option: Click to  Learn More . But when I tried to learn more, it didn't make any sense to me, because I'm a visual person and those descriptions are quite hard to remember. That's why I have decided to be a good samaritan and visualize it, and then share it with you.  As you see, while the border is a third-level element, the shadow is a first-level element. Legend, x-axis, and y-axis are second-level elemen...

Lately, I have needed an image displayer for my Power BI report and I have decided to do a little research before I choose which one to use.  After all, Power BI offers many of them at App Source, and the more choice I have, the pickier I become. Here is the full list of image displayers that I could find, and they are all free. Table and Matrix:  These are between the options that let me display a visual on Power BI's visualizations pane. The advantage is they come with Power BI. You don't need to download anything from App Source and they support URL. It supports links to images and also images encoded to Base64 code. They might be preferable because they don't have the risk of simply disappearing as they are Power BI's own tools. It's possible to change the size of images but it's not possible to fit image 100% to the frame. When I tried to small the frame, they both created a scroll down menu which doesn't look good. Changing the size is also has limits ...

One of the things I like about Power BI is, it supports geospatial visualizations. Map and Filled Map are built-in visualizations we can use if we need a visual with geographic coordinates. But it's not perfect, like everything else, it has some issues. I will explain the issue that I have faced and of course the solution to it. On the map, I visualize sales by city and France is filtered. Despite France is filtered, it shows some cities in the USA. In the beginning, I didn't understand what caused it, but later I have noticed that both countries have cities with the same name and that's the reason for my problem. Somehow, Power BI can't decide which city I meant to see despite I filter by country and shows all the cities with the same name on the map.   The first solution is using latitude and longitude data, but of course, if you have it. I had that data and it solved my problem but I am also going to explain what to do if you don't have latitude and longitude dat...

Adding flags to Power BI Reports might be easier said than done. If you have a dataset which contains data of various countries, adding country flags looks cool. The process to do it, on the other hand, might be compelling. Now I am going to share with you the obstacles I  have faced during the process and of course, how I overcame them. First I made an excel list of countries that my dataset has. Then I have downloaded to my computer all the flags I need from Wikipedia and converted them to Base64 link via an image encoder website  base64-image.de  and added those links to my excel file, which looks like this: After I added my excel file to Power BI, I converted the data category of URL column from 'uncategorized' to 'image URL', which might be a small step for you but it's a big step for the success of the flag operation. Then I created one to many relationship with DimLocation table and chose 'both' as filter direction, so that I can filter from both t...