Basic Power bi questions

Hi Anonymous,

I'm not sure I can answer all your questions, but I'll give it a try. Being new to Power BI, it can be somewhat overwhelming.

1. / 2 / 3: Judging from your questions, Incremental refresh is not the way to go for you and indeed (question 2:) you do need Premium, so unless you're working for a big company, this is probably not for you. Basically incremental refresh allows you to add just the new data to the old data that you have uploaded previously (so question 1: yes). To do this, you need to define a date column (indeed, no other possibilities afaik) and tell BI which date-period needs to be refreshed (most likely just the previous day). Question 3: correct, just dates.

question 4: Once you have created your report, you'll publish it to the Power BI Service. Having done so, you normally have two items, 1. a dataset (the set of tables and it's model), which is what you can schedule to refresh (daily or more frequent, with a maximum of up to 8 times a day I thought) and 2. the report itself, which is based on that dataset. You'll need to download a tool called the Power BI Gateway (personal or on-premisses), to connect the report that you uploaded to the Power BI Report (in the cloud) to your data (the data that you used to build your report in the first place). This gateway needs to run at all times if you want your report to be able to update at all times. Obviously you can choose to reboot if you're not updating anything at a certain moment in time.

Question 5 I don't know. I don't work with the mobile view myself that often, nor with web view charts.

Question 6: yes it does, since you'll be creating a query step (it become part of the process of transforming your data into your desired dataset). You can see this query step on the right side of your Power query editor window in the query settings pane.

Question 7: Not exactly like you describe, but there are simular possibilities, which allow you to do just such a thing:

- you can create your own popup report page, which can already quickly show what you want to know, or

- you can drill-down to a different page (which means that you keep your selected value as part of the filters, or

- you can use bookmarks to keep your selected values (optionally), but change the visuals on the page, or

- you can interactively filter other visuals on the same page by clicking a visual, or

- you can (once uploaded to the Power BI Service and as part of the same workspace or App) use a value to right click and cross-drill a different report specifically for this value.

question 8: you can use relative date filters to filter only the last 7 days. This filter can be saved as part of the report. You can do this for the full report, for a specific page, or for a specific visual.

Hope this answers some of your questions, if you didn't find the answers yourself already. 😉

Cheers,

Niels