Heatmaps are great for spotting trends at a glance, but Power BI doesn’t have a ready-made calendar heatmap. In this blog, I’ll walk through how to build a full-year version using a matrix, a calendar table, and some DAX tricks.

Writing Better DAX Starts with VAR
Ever noticed your DAX formulas taking longer to compute or becoming unreadable as they grow?

One of the easiest and most powerful optimizations you can apply in DAX is using VAR variables to store intermediate results.

In this article, we’ll walk through:

🧠 What VAR really does under the hood
🛠️ How using variables improves performance
✍️ Why your code becomes much easier to maintain
📊 A step-by-step example
🚀 Advanced tips using nested VARs

If you manage Power BI at scale, you’ve probably wished for a single button you could press to stop all report refreshes at once. The reality is that there isn’t a universal one-click UI button in Power BI Desktop or the service to pause all refreshes. The practical, scalable solution? Pause the datasets that feed your reports. When a dataset’s refresh is paused, all reports that rely on that dataset stop refreshing too. You can get almost the same experience as a one-click solution by automating the pause across your target workspaces using REST API, PowerShell, or a small Flow/App.

On many occasions, I come across problems that could easily be solved using the Power BI REST API. I often recommend it, but I’m increasingly encountering users who feel a bit intimidated by interacting with the API.

This article will guide us through setting up the necessary configurations to authenticate and start using the Power BI REST API with Python, using SimplePBI. However, remember that the setup is independent of the programming language. Once the credentials are ready, any language can be used.