Joe Travers

How to ... Happy Holidays Reader,Let's end off our 2025 with a fun post that runs down the most popular How To Use Power BI posts of 2025. Nice and easy. These are not only what you (and the other people that get these emails) click on, but what people are searching for (and finding) using Google, etc. :) We'll continue the How To goodness in January, okay? The Most Popular Posts in 2025 were.... 1. How to connect Power BI to Excel Data. 2. How to document your Power Query data...

What the heck is a Semantic Model, Microsoft? Hey there Reader,A couple years ago, Microsoft started referring to datasets and data models as "Semantic Models"... so just what is a Semantic Model? Do we need to do anything different with them than regular datasets. Spoiler: It's just a different term for a dataset / data model, and I'm pretty sure it's because Microsoft likes gatekeeping with jargon.How to figure out what a Semantic Model is. You can totally SHARE this email with your friends...

How to "set" that table... Hey there Reader, A couple weeks ago we learned how to Make a Table Visual (and why they are only good for a few select purposes)... this week we're learning how you should Format a Table Visual. EVERY TIME.Tables have tons of formatting choices, but this tutorial shows you the essential ones you should ALWAYS check for. How to format a Table Visual You can totally SHARE this email with your friends / colleagues / neighbors / pets. Just click that forward button....

How to format pages in Power BI Hey there Reader,This week we're delving into Page Formatting this week... how to customize how our Power BI canvas (that space that we build our visuals on) to look however we want. The Page Formatting tools show up when you have nothing selected in your report. So, if you click somewhere on your Canvas that doesn’t have a visual, you’ll see a Page + Paintbrush icon show up on the Visualizations Pane. These are the options for customizing your page.Page...

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION! Our AEA Workshop Video! Hey there [FIRST NAME GOES HERE],Our workshop video is ready for you! Thanks for your patience on this, as I've been trying to get an accurate participant list from AEA... I have a feeling that because they scheduled TWO Power BI workshops at the same time at the conference, some people may have gone to the wrong one...AEA said they'd have an updated list for me next week, but I'm not holding my breath, and wanted to send you the video without...

Set the Table, it's almost Thanksgiving (if you're American) Hey there Reader, You didn't get an email from me last week... did you miss me? I was in Kansas City at the American Evaluation Association conference meeting great people so I thought I would give you a break. I co-hosted a big data viz party and taught ~50 evaluators how to get started with Power BI in a half-day "Crash Course" workshop.I'll share a couple photos further below...This week's post is all about the basics of the...

How to use DAX to count up something (and ignore duplicate values.) Hey hey Reader, A few months ago I posted about the DAX COUNT function (which counts things, because #obvi) ... but it counts EVERYTHING, including duplicate values. So, thankfully there's the DISTINCTCOUNT function, so you can count something up and ignore all those duplicates. VERY handy if you have a large dataset and need to use an accurate count of something (ID #s, departments, clients, etc etc etc) in some DAX. DAX:...