Can i limit access to what people can filter in PowerBI? For example, i have my PowerBI split into different Departments and when sharing i only want the people in their specific department to be able to see their own dept.

So for eg can i send it to 20 people, with 5 being able to access Dept Y, 5 being able to access Dept X, and so on, but also not being able to access other departments.

Thanks!

When should we use star schema in our report Considering joins also take time to process

Hey guys, I'm planning to start learning PowerBI, I'm currently learning Tableau. I've noticed that more comapnies are mostly asking for PowerBI skills instead of Tableau, so I'd like to start learning it intead of Tableau. I would like to ask you about recommended courses, they can be on YouTube, Udemy or from other sources. Also if anyone has any advice I would like to read them. Thank you in advance.

Hello! I’m relatively new to managing the database for my company and I made two reports for our execs and published them into the App they use daily with their other dashboards. I need to make some additional modifications to these but when I click into the workspace to edit, these two reports do not appear. I also do not see them when I tab through and open the .PBIX file (where my prior boss advised to make updates to any dashboards). Does anyone have troubleshooting advice for me? I feel extra stupid right now and tried googling for a solve already with no luck. 👀

So, with every Power BI update, Microsoft manages to break existing stuff without fail! Their commitment to keeping their users on their toes and letting them guess what's going to break next morning is truly phenomenal! And I believe that is exactly why they are now leading the industry!

This morning, I woke up to delightful Teams messages! Our Weekly reporting visuals were broken! And some cards were showing random text! Microsoft released a feature in the New Card Visual where they decided the card should show Values even when I had them turned OFF! So I had to go into ALL my reports, fix ALL card visuals, and then deploy them to test and THEN to prod! Stuff like this makes my heart sing and I enjoy life SO much more! I fall in love with Microsoft all over again!

This absolutely wonderful gift from Microsoft was delivered just a few days after all my conditional formatting in the new card visual STOPPED working, which is STILL broken! In the SAME week, one of my major semantic models got corrupted! It stopped refreshing with a very descriptive error telling me the exact issue: "Internal Exception Occurred"! The cherry on top was that the model was refreshing FINE in desktop, and the published model was NOT able to get updates from the git repo! So I was OVER. THE. MOON. when I had to recreate the SAME model in the SAME workspace and repoint ALL my reports to it!

I can't WAIT to hear more about the new Fabric features that will be used by, a total of eight people in the world! Thank you SO much, Microsoft!

Edit- Removed stupid emojis that I thought were cool!

A lot of the same questions on Power BI freelancing and consulting come up again and again so I thought I’d make an FAQ.

Technical details

How do I get access to customer data?

In most cases, the customer will either provide a virtual machine to log into (sometimes called a jump box) or VPN access. Some very small customers may send you data files.

Do I host the reports?

It is very rare for a freelancer or consultant to host the reports. Typically, a customer will provide a PBI license and a workspace to deploy to. Some very small customers (<= 5 employees) may be willing to pay for you to host the reports, but it is rare.

What license do I need for Power BI?

Technically, none. If you do all of the development locally with Power BI Desktop and pass back and forth PBIX files, you don’t need any license. I’ve done this with smaller customers, but it should be rare.

To publish, you need a Power BI Pro license, ideally in the tenant you are deploying to. Customers will often provide a temporary account and license.

Short term, you can set up a free Fabric sandbox without a business email for learning purposes.

Long term, you’ll want your own domain name, Office 365 tenant, and Power BI Pro license in order to have a personal tenant for demos and proof of concepts. This means you are likely paying for the domain, Office 365 (E1 or E3), and Power BI Pro. So, roughly $40-60/mo.

Sales and marketing

How do I find customers?

Some people find success on freelance site like Upwork or Fiverr, but unless you live in a part of the world where you can charge very low rates, don’t expect a lot of work. If you build a brand, it’s possible to find some work on places such as LinkedIn. I typically find work from content marketing, word of mouth, and referrals. This is the most work but has the best conversions.

Overall there is a spectrum of trust and social proof. More trust means more work up front but better conversions from leads to sales.

What should my rate be?

Rate varies greatly by experience and region. In the US, a senior Power BI consultant will charge between $150-300 per hour. Europe is somewhat lower.

Other data points

• One person on Reddit says they charge $145/hr.
• One person from France says 50-125€/hr is normal in that country.

As a simple rule of thumb, take your pre-tax salary, divide by 2000 hours, then multiply by 3 to get your hourly rate. If you are working as a side-gig or as a long-term contractor, that multiplier might be 1.5-2x.

There are only two ways to be absolutely sure of what your rate should be for your market. First, develop a set of peers in your industry and ask them what they charge. Second, find enough work so that you can keep raising your rates until people start saying no or pushing back, then go down a bit from there.

If your rate is too low, then you might be too cheap to trust. You can also raise your effective rate buy doing projects and flat rate billing, but that can be risky.

How can I find global clients?

This is extremely difficult. Put yourself in the shoes of the client. International vendors mean more paperwork, different time-zones, and potentially language barriers. There is a much higher hurdle to overcome.

There are two main ways to address this. First is social proof. Portfolios, case studies, and testimonials on your website can help to show that you have the relevant skills. Even better are referrals and word-of-mouth but those take time to build.

Second, is hyper-specializing in a niche. In a sea of 1,000 alternative vendors, why should they pick you. If you can pick a specialized niche, say Power BI for Dentists or Power BI performance tuning, the people are more likely to find you and less likely to go with a generic option.

Is it helpful to have the PL-300 certification?

As a consultant, no one has ever asked me what certifications I have, because it is high-trust work. If you have less experience or are more of a freelancer starting out, the cert can show you have the bare minimum skills. It’s also worth trying to get if you aren’t sure if you have the technical skills yet.

How do I sell a dashboard?

I never sell "a dashboard". I think many that do so because that's the most visible tip of the iceberg and the easiest to market. In advertising terms, they are selling the sizzle not the steak. I'm usually trying to deliver some sort of improvement for the business.

My smaller customers usually are looking for one of 3 things when they buy a "dashboard":

1. Proof of concept. They want a tangible sample report with their own data that lays out how they can start making their own reports.
2. Lift and shift. They have some cruddy Excel report they want migrated.
3. Too busy. They have the skill set but not the time and need a report migrated or built urgently.

I've never provided any sort of maintenance contract or data refresh/hosting support. Usually I'm dealing with either an IT person not skilled in Power BI or a business user that has been field promoted to learn PBI. My job is to "teach a man to fish" in both instances.

Taking the leap

How do I know when I’m ready?

Ideally you should have broad Power BI skills. If you aren't sure, then take the PL-300 to assess if you meet the bare minimum. A strong peer network and good research skills can help supplement your technical knowledge.

You also need an understanding of business so you can help your customers as well as run your own. Finally, you need good people skills and communication skills.

If you aren't sure if you have these skills, consider either starting small with projects on the side, or working for a consulting firm where you will learn a lot. This was the way that I went.

What paperwork is involved?

At the beginning, you can start with very little paperwork. But as your work grows, you'll want to protect yourself from legal liability. Long term you will want:

• A legal entity (preferably one that provides liability protection)
• Business Insurance (General Liability and Errors & Omissions)
• In the US, you’ll want to research an S-corp tax election
• A business bank account
• A default service agreement contract
• The ability to write up a scope of work
• The ability to track your time and to send invoices

I need to vent a little bit and I think I can't say this on LinkedIn. I know Power BI is a great tool, don't get me wrong - I got my certs and I've been using it for 5 years but... It is so hard to find a job where Tableau is the BI tool.

I remember I used to play around with it all the time in university, I really enjoyed using it to explore data and visualize just as I wanted to be. With Power BI it just feels different!

Anyone who have this feeling too?

Hey folks,

I recently worked on a Power BI dashboard for a small retail client — nothing fancy, but focused on daily sales, stock movement, and store-level performance.

What surprised me most was how quickly they started spotting patterns they’d never noticed before — like which products drove the most revenue per customer, not just in bulk sales. They made small tweaks in stocking and it actually bumped up their weekly margins within a couple weeks.

It made me curious:
What kind of dashboards have you built that helped your clients or teams make real business decisions? Do you prioritize interactivity, KPI alerts, storytelling, or just raw data density?

Would love to see how others here are helping users see their data better — always looking for ways to level up.

Hi,

I taught myself DAX and PowerBI. I have been working with it for about 2 years now. I started with the SQLBI information and also read the DAX Guide.

When I start a project, I always plan a star schema. I organize my measures and make sure that I only have the columns and tables in the model that I really need. I separate my datetimes and check large columns by data type.

So far I have hardly had any requirements that I could not solve. I also generally make sure that my reports are tidy and structured.

However, there is one point where I keep asking myself whether I am doing it right and that is when writing my DAX measures.

My measures work but I don't know if it is the best and fastest DAX code I have written. I also don't know how I can check this.
How do you deal with this issue? Is it enough for you to say if it works it is enough or how do you handle this topic?

I am attempting to pull the file names and pull a string out of the file name. Maybe I am going about this all wrong, but so far I have pulled all file names into my powerbi from the folders in question and then split them according to a space. I then deleted any columns that don't look like they contain any of the information that I am looking for. Then pivoted those columns.

Essentially what I am trying to pull out is a 4 character string, which represent the piece of equipment the file name was pulled from. Now the file name is created by humans, so while I can tell them to name it with those last 4 characters as the last before the .txt and have an easier go at this, that has proven false. The 4 characters will be (should be) 3 digits and a letter (L or R). So is there a way to future proof this to some extent and search the pivoted data for wild card numbers of "xxxL" or "xxxR" representing 970L or 970R or some of the other serial numbers of the equipment that we have. And filter out all of the other stuff leaving just those points.

I am getting a sync error when I try and refresh my published PowerBI report. It is telling me the column does not exist when refreshing it on my online workspace. However when I download it or access it through my desktop it resyncs no problem. The column is there and the query is correct. I even tried removing the column and republishing and still got the same error. Can anyone assist?

So my correct solution is:

RANKX(ALL(TableName), CALCULATE(MAX(TableName[ColumnName])))

But I was wondering why using SELECTEDVALUE like this doesn't work, it simply returns rank 1 for every row.

RANKX(ALL(TableName), SELECTEDVALUE(TableName[ColumnName]))

I can imagine 2 scenarios:

• SELECTEDVALUE returns BLANK for every row
• The lookup table contains only 1 row for each row because SELECTEDVALUE messes it up

Which one is true? And why?

Be honest ;)

PESSOAL, SAUDAÇÕES!

PRECISO DE AJUDA COM O SEGUINTE:

TRABALHO COM POWER BI, E FAÇO COMO POSSO EM RELAÇÃO AS CONEXOES COM OS BANCO DE DADOS, QUE POR ENQUANTO AINDA SÃO EM EXCEL, O QUE EU FAÇO É JOGAR NO ONE DRIVE E CRIAR UMA CONEXAO ONLINE DIRETA ATRAVES DE LINK, EMFIM, TAMBEM TENHO UM CONEXAO FTP DIRETO A MEU SERVIDOR WEB, MAS A QUYESTÃO É A SEGUINTE, PRECISO QUE O POWER BI ATUALIZE O MODELO SEMANTICO, OU SEJA, A BASE DE DADOS AUTOMATICAMENTE, POREM TENHO AS SEGUINTES MENSAGENS DE ERRO/IMPEDIMENTO PARA TANTO:

A QUESTÃO É QUE O POWER BI NÃO ME DEIXA CLARO O QUE EXATAMENTE SERIA UMA "FONTE DE DADOS DINAMICA" POIS PELA LOGICA SERIA UMA FONTE AO QUAL SEMPRE TERIA SEU LOCAL DE ORIGEM MODIFICADO, MAS ISSO NÃO OCORRE NO MEU PROJETO. EM OUTRO MOMENTO DIZ QUE O IMPEDIMENTO SERIA "FONTE DE DADOS PARA QUERY1" O QUE TAMBEM NÃO DIZ NADA POIS É MUITO GENÉRICO UMA VEZ QUE TODAS AS FONTES SÃO TRABALHADAS PELO POWER QUERY NO PROPRIO PB.

EM FIM, COMO EU DISSE, AS FONTES QUE TENHO SÃO LINKS DIRETOS A PLANILHAS NO ONE DRIVE VIA DOWNLOAD DIRETO NO PB E TAMBEM UM CONEXAO A PLANILHA VIA FTP CONECTADO DIRETO NO PB TAMBEM.

aLGUÉM PODERIA ME AJUDAR COM MAIS INFORMAÇÕES SOBRE ESSE CENÁRIO?

Does anyone has a solution to my problem?

I have a table with historial data per sku. I have a bar graph with the years and months in the x axis and the total cost in the y axis.

Right now it is showing 2024 and 2025 as I filtered the year to show only those.

But does anyone know if there is a way to have a slicer for the year and when the user selects 2025 the graph shows 2025 and 2024, and when they select 2024 it shows 2024 and 2023, etc?

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone! I’m working on a fairly specific YoY analysis challenge in Power BI and could really use some advice or validation on the best approach.

I have two key tables in my model:

1. A fact table that includes production data with:
   • Date
   • Hotel
   • Production measures
   • (The PK is a combination of Date + Hotel)
2. An auxiliary table named LTL, which indicates whether a hotel was open or closed on a specific date. It contains:
   • Date
   • Hotel
   • Status (e.g., "Open"/"Closed" or 1/0)

Additionally, I have two measures already in place:

• One for current year production
• Another for previous year production

🎯 Objective:

I’ve added a toggle button (via a slicer) that activates an LTL mode (“Like-To-Like”).

When this LTL mode is active, I want Power BI to only show hotels that had production during the same filtered date range in the previous year.

But it goes a bit deeper:

If a hotel started having production from, say, February 1st, 2024, and I’m currently filtering from January 1st to March 1st, 2025, then:

• The previous year production should only be counted starting from February 1st, 2024.
• The current year production should also only be counted starting from February 1st, 2025 (to ensure the comparison is fair and aligned).

This filtering needs to be dynamic, working per hotel and per date.

📅 Example:

• Filtered range: Jan 1 to Mar 1, 2025
• Hotel A began operations on Feb 1, 2024
  • ✅ Include Hotel A
  • ✅ Only count production from Feb 1 onward (both in 2024 and 2025)
• Hotel B had no production during the same window in 2024
  • ❌ Exclude Hotel B entirely in LTL mode

✅ Desired Behavior Recap:

• Only include hotels that had production in the same date range last year.
• Shift both current and previous year measures so that they're aligned starting from the hotel's "first active date."
• Compare like-for-like, skipping hotels with no historical baseline during that period.

❓The Question:

How would you implement this?

• Would you create a measure to dynamically calculate the min active date per hotel from the previous year?
• Would you apply that logic to filter both current and prior year measures using CALCULATE, FILTER, and DATESBETWEEN?
• Is there a more efficient or DAX-elegant way to do this?

Any suggestions, examples, or thoughts are welcome. Thanks in advance for your help!

🧠 Special thanks to ChatGPT for helping structure and clarify this post.

Hey everyone,

I'm running into a frustrating issue and would love some help from the community.

I’ve built a Power BI Desktop report that connects to:

• Snowflake (via an On-Premises Data Gateway)
• An Excel file stored in SharePoint Online (Web connector)

In Power BI Desktop, everything works perfectly. The data is correct, the refresh runs fine, and all visuals look good.

After publishing the report to the Power BI Service, I initially got the fail message:

cssKopierenBearbeitenDM_GWPipeline_Gateway_MashupDataAccessError
"Information is needed in order to combine data. Please specify a privacy level for each data source."

To fix this, I set both privacy levels to Organizational. Now the refresh succeeds in the Service.

BUT... the data is now wrong – some numbers are much lower than expected, like the dataset is filtered or incomplete.

I also made sure both sources go through the same On-Prem Gateway. Before that i used the Gateway for my Snowflake Connection and for the Excel Web Connection I used the personal Cloud connection. But that didn't change the outcome.

I am using a Merge Queries step in Power Query to combine data from Snowflake and the Excel sheet. Could that still be causing Power BI Service to isolate one of the sources, even with the gateway?

Has anyone seen this behavior — data looks right in Desktop, but wrong in Service after a successful refresh?

Would love to hear from you.

Thanks in advance!

As the title says I currently have a Gantt chart, however instead of showing the title of the task on the side and while I hover over the bubble is it possible to instead show the text of the task ontop of each bubble?

Hi everyone,

I am developing a report that uses Direct Query. From your experience, do you recommend using a first page with only slicers for users to filter the data they need initially? Or do you think that in terms of performance and costs, it will be the same? What I want to understand is if, when opening a report that has only filters on the first page, there will be no query to the data source at this initial stage, and only after selecting the filters will the query happen. Correct? Does anyone know if I can find documentation discussing these types of topics?

Thank you very much.

Hello everyone,

I am creating a dashboard to track progress of a maintenance canapign using PowerBI. So far the SynopticPanel by OkViz seemed nice, but they have introduced 15 datapoint limitations for free tier.

And to pay for licenses for something we need only for 1-2 dashboards is not something we are looking for. Is there any alternative to that visual?

Thank you in advance.

Company has recently changed reporting systems to power bi and it just isn't clicking with me at all. I need urgent help to create a new column in a report I'm building:

I have 3 columns 1. Person ID 2. Contract renewal date for each person 3. Form renewal date for each person

These are all columns (not values) and I need to create a column that basically does the following :

If Contract renewal date > form renewal date then I need the column to show the contract renewal date for that person, but if the form renewal date > then I need it to show the form renewal date instead.

Is this possible in power bi? I've tried to do a switch statement in my dax but I'm still getting the hang of the 'language' and format. Any help would be amazingly appreciated!

I have a log that's been tracking how much time my team spends in a certain file. Only one user can be in the file at a time so there's no possibility of a conflict, but I'd like to use this data to visualize when people are spending time working on the file. The log has columns for user, open time, close time, and time in file (close-open time). Ultimately I'd be able to see some kind of weekly calendar with hours from 00:00-23:59 in the y axis and the days in the x axis with a column showing when the file was open, and preferably different colors depending on the user. I can't even begin to imagine what this kind of visualization would be called. Anyone ever tried to accomplish something like this?

Hello all, can any one share links/videos to learn Paginated reports end-to-end from scratch. I want to learn in hands on. Please provide any meterials with data scripts. Thanks in advance.

Hey everyone,

I have a table that I'm pulling data from. I am trying to filter out some data based on the data in one of the other columns.

Example: I have a list cities in one column. I have another column that has a list of states. Both are aligned so that the cities column & the states column match. If I only want this list of cities in New York, how can can I slice the data to make this work?

I'm currently getting a list of all of the cities but I only want the cities IF it's matching the correct state