Posted by
Andy Brown
on 14 June 2019
When you're copying worksheets containing range names, Excel can detect conflicts and take you into a seemingly endless loop of Yes/No dialog boxes. This blog explains why this happens, and how to get out of the loop!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 11 June 2019
If you're creating Reporting Services reports using multivalue parameters and stored procedures, you'll find this function to split a list of values into a single-table column useful.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 15 May 2019
This blog shows how to create custom date periods within a date table for 28 day cycles, but the principles shown could be applied to create any custom date periods.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 15 May 2019
Learn how to create a basic date table in Power BI, using either the CALENDAR or CALENDARAUTO functions, and also learn how to then add custom columns of your own.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 15 May 2019
Whether your financial year ends on a fixed date every year or on the first Monday in June, this blog will show you how to incorporate it into your calendar table.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 13 May 2019
If your stored procedures or SQL queries are running slowly, don't bother looking at correlated subqueries, cursors, functions or any of the other usual culprits. There's one SQL syntax which Wise Owl have found to be an order of magnitude worse than any other, as this blog shows.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 09 May 2019
All trainers live for that moment when someone's face lights up, as they learn something new which will change their working life for the better. This blog lists my 5 biggest such OOH moments from our Excel training courses. How many of these tips do you know?
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 02 May 2019
This blog explains why you might want to use the PARAMETERS tab in the Dataset Properties dialog box in SSRS.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 29 March 2019
Someone has finally won our competition to think of a better acronym for the order of keywords in SQL, we're pleased to announce.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 07 July 2023
Power BI encourages you to publish reports to an online service so that you can share your beautiful reports with the world. If you'd rather keep them a secret you can use Power BI Report Server to deploy your reports to an on-premises server, as this blog series shows you.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 22 February 2019
Context transition happens when a DAX function creates filter context within row context, or vice versa. This blog explains what context transition is, and shows which DAX functions make use of it.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 29 January 2019
Row context (along with its sibling, filter context) is one of the most important concepts in DAX. This blog explains what row context is, and how to use it!
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 25 January 2019
Understanding filter context is the key to understanding how to create measures in DAX. This blog aims to explain this vital subject as succinctly as possible!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 January 2019
This blog shows how to create fully dynamic reports, whereby users can choose which statistics to show and which dimensions to report them by.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 December 2018
Following a question from a Power BI course, this blog shows how you can get a page to show the top N customers by sales value, where N is a number controlled by a slicer.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 05 November 2018
Given your current stock levels and forecast sales, it should be possible to report on future stock depletion in Power BI. This two-part blog shows you how to just that!
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 30 July 2018
Learn to use DAX variables, and understand how they can be used to break up code. Not true debugging, but better than nothing!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 23 July 2018
Need to generate a partition for a fact table for each year, product or region? This blog gives five approaches, so that you can choose which method is for you.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 23 July 2018
This blog shows how you can load the empty structure of a large fact table into an Analysis Services tabular data model, then use partitions to bring in the data bit by bit.
Posted by
Sam Lowrie
on 18 July 2018
Some technique to remind users what levels they chose while using drilldown.