https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/feed.xml Aaron Bator -- SharePoint Premier Field Engineer Wed, 17 Apr 2019 03:14:22 GMT en-US hourly 1 https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/more-powerbi-desktop-mapping-for-the-unconnected Mon, 13 Mar 2017 18:01:31 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=886 Synoptic Panel from Custom Images Export from Visio as a png file This turned out to be one of the easiest options I found after I tried a couple of other things. Once you have the .png file, setting up the regions in the Synoptic Designer is pretty simple, as long as you realize something I missed for awhile: You name the shape with the first box, the box which says "Area name (to display)" isn't what you want. I chased my tail for awhile assuming that the Area name was supposed to go in the second box. Turns out that name does get overlayed in the Synoptic Designer window while you're editing, but it's not the name of the Area. This ends up being really important since you have to be able to reference the area with your data -- I took a simple approach and used an Excel spreadsheet with just a few columns -- and if you don't name it correctly, you won't get the results you want. For my sample here, I opened Microsoft Visio and chose one of the templates which in the Basic Network group, the "Small/Medium Business Network Diagram". I think this is intended to show you a simplified diagram you can start to build with, which was great for a demo. I decided to pick on three of the elements, a Server, a printer and a computer. For the server, it was easy to use the "wizard" in the Synoptic Designer editor -- one click and it highlighted the shape I wanted. I named it ServerOne and then made sure my spreadsheet had a row for ServerOne with a value and a target and a description. For the printer, the Visio shape is composed of a few shapes together. Luckily, this isn't too big of a problem, you can use the wizard and name  multiple shapes with the same label - PrinterOne in this case. Start with a png file The other option is to start with a png file and upload that to the Synoptic Designer. I found map online which is several years old but shows some of the downtown area of Stuttgart, Germany. If the map you choose has some well-defined contiguous areas, you can use the wizard to define them, but you'll likely want to also be able to use the "draw new areas" tool. Both work well, but defining a new area may work best if you're trying to indicate an irregularly-shaped area. It takes a little getting used to, but it's like other digitizing programs you may have used where it's trying to make sure there's a closed shape, so don't be surprised as you use it that you get an increasingly complicated polygon until you get back to the "start" of your shape. Similar to the other visualization, I didn't put a lot of detail into the data here, I simply wanted to show that you could define your own regions and then allow for a filter and a table to highlight the data. I like that you can either use the filter -- single or multiple select -- and see the resulting region on the map, or you can click the region on the map and see the table values change in response. You can also hover over a defined region and see the data. Clearly there's a lot of uses for visually walking through your data set, and I'll make another post soon to expand on this, but I wanted to share my experience with starting to define my own "maps" and using Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service to display that data.  ]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/mapping-in-power-bi-desktop-for-the-disconnected-what-options-do-you-have Fri, 10 Mar 2017 21:14:42 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=845 Map Examples in Power BI for the disconnected Mapping in Power BI and Power BI Desktop is one of the features that gets you the "WOW!" response. Sometimes it really is nothing more than providing some great visual context to well-known data, but I find that when folks get to see a map and then work with the simplest features of filtering or selecting data from clicking an element of interest, that's when you really see the interest in the product take off. Unfortunately, for some customers a connection from their data to the Internet isn't possible. The Bing maps powering the default map visualization work well, but only if you can access the Bing maps servers. So what do you do to display geographic data when you don't have an Internet connection? This was a recent challenge my customer gave me so I started to make sure I understood the options and the challenges, and now I'm sharing that with you. If you're the kind of person who skips to the end of a novel, scroll to the bottom and take a look at the report I've linked there. And when you're ready, come back and learn about what I wanted to show. I wanted to start with the simplest of data here since I wanted to focus on the presentation pieces, and so I started by making a quick list of European cities I've visited. This is pretty similar to the template the Sam Lester discussed in his 12 Days of Dashboards series where he was using a spreadsheet to capture the countries he visited. Default Map Visualization: This should be the easy one, pick the Map icon and feed it some geographic data. This is the first of the 5 items shown below. And it requires an Internet connection with Power BI desktop to display. You get a couple of interesting chances to work as a good data scientist here, since you will learn you need to clean up your data a little. I wanted to focus on the maps, but needed some data, so I started an Excel sheet with city names. You might think that "Berlin" in a list of cities was obviously referring to the capital city of Germany, but you may learn that there's a city in New Jersey also named Berlin. Similarly for Granada not showing up in Spain, or Brest not showing up in France, but instead on the eastern edge of Poland as a reference to the Brest-Litovsky treaty . There are a couple of ways you could deal with this, but the easy one may be to check out the map, and then if you see an obvious error, change the data to something less ambiguous like "Berlin, Germany" or "Granada, Spain". Globe Map (Custom Visual) Similar to the default Map, you could install the custom visual Globe Map from https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/ . It will also require an Internet connection. I learned here that I needed to spend some more time on my data entry since the view of just the cities on the map wasn't very inspiring or obvious. So I made some quick estimates of the number of days or visits I had to the cities and used that as the "heat" for the heat map. Interesting view of the same data, from which I conclude I should make an effort to stay in Southern Europe more often, but still not useful for my customer. Shape Maps Another custom visual, Shape Maps are an option for my customer's scenario where we want to use Power BI Desktop and not connect to the Internet. I learned some more here about data cleanup and entry, specifically that I need to learn how each of the available shape maps encodes the region since that's the part the "lights up" when you use the Shape Maps. You'll see I pulled in the Shape Maps of France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and the Netherlands. There are a couple more European countries available, but not all. Some nice functionality here, including being able to select the region and have the chart reflect the data for the region. Or to use a slicer for the country name and see the regions change colors based on the data. On the data entry side, I did have to learn from the shape maps what the region names were. And where there were some interesting differences to what I expected: If you have a great monitor and eyesight to match, you've probably already seen an error which took me a long while to find -- while "Île-de-France" is listed in the name column, the id column has "Ile-del-France" which isn't the name of the region. Or correct French. But once you know that, you can add the column to your data to correctly represent Region names, in this case the region that includes those 8 departements (Paris, Essonne, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Seine-et-Marne, Val-de-Marne, Val-d'Oise, and Yvelines) or 75, 91, 92, 93, 77, 94, 95, and 78 to use the numbers. This made me realize that with the shape map, you're bound to whatever divisions appear in the published map. It's been awhile since the 18th Century reorganization of the former Provinces of France into the départements (and the mysterious ways non-consecutive numbers align so 75 is next to 92 but 76 is further away in Normandy), but if you want a Shape Map which uses those smaller divisions than the current French Regions, you'll need to make your own map. Which the Synoptic Panel (below) may allow you to do. Similarly for the other European countries, you'll need to do some data entry/cleanup to make sure that you're capturing DE-SL for Saarland in Germany and NL-LI for the Dutch province of Limburg. On the Shape Maps below, I also used the new Matrix view of the data for fun, so you can see how many days I guessed I spent in the provinces of Netherlands. Synoptic Panel for Power BI and the Synoptic Designer If you've read this far, you probably, like me, really needed to find a solution where you could define your own map areas for a Power BI Desktop report where you didn't have an Internet connection.  Luckily there is another option here, which may be adaptable for your needs. Full marks to the folks at http://okviz.com/synoptic-panel/ for providing this since you have a lot more flexibility here in creating or adapting a map or drawing and using Power BI to "light up" the regions you want to. You will need another round of data entry first, though, since the default setup for the Synoptic panel is to have a named region -- like a country --- and a measurement, and a target. So if you're trying to plot sales of an item or the density of population, you may have ready-made data for this. For my demo data, I decided to use my existing estimate of the days or trips to a location and then throw in a target of 365 days for all of the cities. So my display is some sort of visual percentage of how much of a year I've spent in the location. Since we saw in the Shape Maps the need to identify the region correctly, it's not surprising we have to do that here, too. And, like the Shape Maps, you're bound to the choices that have been made for the .svg file. The easy solution here I wanted to show was to use the publicly available map of Europe. You can extend this by making your own drawing, selecting the regions, naming them and then using that as your base map, and I will cover that in a future post, but for this one I just chose one which is already available. Once I learned which country was which number -- a fun game to try and you hover over countries in the former Yugoslavia you might not be as familiar with -- I just had to add a column to my simple worksheet for the "Area Number". You'll notice that not every European country is visible on the map -- on this resolution Lichtenstein and Andorra aren't easily visible, and the island of Malta got left off -- but this does a pretty good job of what my customer first asked for: Data mapped to countries on a map with the ability to filter either by clicking the country on the map or the filter on the dashboard. Clearly, this isn't the most elegant solution yet, and the "Unmatched Areas" is something which gets a little confusing. In this map part of Russia is visible in the map, but isn't available as an Area. There's an option in the configuration for the custom web part to hide the unmatched areas, but I didn't select it here since I wanted it to be obvious that this was a map of Europe not just selected countries. Next Steps: My next request from the customer is going to be some more detailed maps with specific data. I'll work through the Synoptic Panel parts of that, see what other options I can come up and then report back what I find. Until then, happy mapping!         Map Examples in Power BI for the disconnected]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/fips-and-visual-studio-2015 Fri, 10 Mar 2017 13:10:37 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=855 https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/ssrs-tech-preview-with-power-bi-displayed-in-the-browser Wed, 25 Jan 2017 11:49:40 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=825 https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/november-power-bi-update-resolves-fips-issue Thu, 08 Dec 2016 15:26:39 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=815 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/samlester/2016/10/25/power-bi-fails-with-windows-platform-fips-validated-cryptographic-algorithms-error-due-to-fips-algorithm-policy/) an issue with the FIPS configuration and Power BI. I'm pleased to say that my recent testing of this on the November update showed that the issue has been resolved! For folks who don't work in environments where they need to enforce FIPS compliance, you may never have even heard about this configuration. But for folks who do, this was a big deal since Power BI was essentially unusable. I haven't done any exhaustive testing here, but on a machine I configured with the FIPS registry key -- HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\FipsAlgorithmPolicy Enabled to 1 -- on the October build I could not create any visualizations without an error. Once I updated that machine to the November update, the error did not appear. That's great news for the Power BI community and a great example of how product feedback can be incorporated into the product very quickly, even when the Power BI team is already working hard every month to release new features!    ]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/power-bi-and-ssrs-just-became-better-friends Fri, 28 Oct 2016 17:00:43 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=805 SQL Server Product Team Blog there's now a preview available of the new integration between these two products. What does this really mean? Well, if you've been working with Power BI Desktop in a place where using the Power BI Service is not available -- like I usually do -- this is a great way to get the dashboards you make in the Desktop product available to users on a web page. More information on the integration between Power BI and SSRS 2016 as well as integration between SharePoint 2016 and Power BI should be coming out soon, but wanted to highlight the announcement of the release of the latest integration between SSRS 2016 and Power BI.]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/power-bi-and-fips-do-not-play-well-together Tue, 25 Oct 2016 18:53:46 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=785 <runtime> <enforceFIPSPolicy enabled="false"/> </runtime> This will allow Power BI Desktop to work on a machine with the FIPS registry key set. Obviously, this bypasses the security feature intended by setting the registry key, but only for this application, which may be a security posture you are able to live with. Many thanks to the user bmc_200 in the Power BI User forums for posting this suggestion in a thread titled The latest upgrade broke all of my reports. How can I get the 2.32.4307.362 64-bit installer? I tested this on a couple of machines today and was able to make some happy customers. _______ My colleague, Sam Lester has a new blog post about an issue I've just seen at my customer as they have started to roll out Windows 10:  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/samlester/2016/10/25/power-bi-fails-with-windows-platform-fips-validated-cryptographic-algorithms-error-due-to-fips-algorithm-policy/ FIPS is a setting which restricts the algorithms which can be used to encrypt data. SharePoint administrators are usually familiar with this setting having learned that SharePoint versions are not FIPS-compliant. Turns out that Power BI Desktop - at least at the moment -- is not compliant with FIPS either. You may see a couple of different behaviors if you see enable the FIPS registry key. If you try and use a SharePoint list as a data source, you'll get an error, as Sam notes which says "This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms.   If you try something simpler, like connecting to an Excel workbook, you can connect to the source and even modify the query, but when you try to add any information to the dashboard, you'll get this error and the data will never display. There should be some announcements about Power BI this week -- SQL PASS Summit is on this week -- and hopefully there will also be an announcement soon about this issue.]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/data-science-track-in-the-microsoft-professional-program-now-out-of-beta-my-first-impressions-from-taking-the-first-courses Thu, 06 Oct 2016 12:00:33 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=765 https://academy.microsoft.com/en-us/professional-program/data-science/ Looks like there have been a couple of changes already, including changing the timing for the courses. I started the T-SQL course and was looking to finish it before the deadline and then was pleasantly surprised when the completion data was pushed from October to December. Seems like the release of the program has changed it so all the courses can be started and are all set to end in several months, instead of the original "stair-step" completion. My first impressions are overwhelmingly positive. The courses I've completed so far (Data Science Orientation, Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel, Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI) and the courses I've started (Querying Data with Transact-SQL, Statistical Thinking for Data Science and Analytics) have been a good intro to lots of topics and though they weren't originally intended as a complete course curriculum, they work well together. These courses have some great information and do a good job of illustrating some of the overall themes which the degree program is aimed at. Computer Science, Math/Statistics and Business Experience are essential pieces of a data science background. I'm looking forward to working through more courses in the coming months and tackling the challenge of the final project!  ]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/microsoft-professional-degree-in-data-science Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:08:24 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=736 https://borntolearn.mslearn.net/b/weblog/posts/announcing-the-microsoft-professional-degree-mpd-program The first instance of these I have seen is in Data Science, but I can only imagine there will be additional ones to follow soon: https://academy.microsoft.com/en-US/professional-degree/data-science/ This was just announced and is still in beta, but I think this will be a great way to identify coursework which, taken together, builds competency in a specific area. It's also really nice to see there's some flexibility -- for the Data Science courses there's a couple of the requirements which offer alternatives, like an Intro to R course or an intro to Python which could each meet the objective. Since I've already worked through one of the 10 required courses, I might now be inspired to work through the others so I'll blog about that experience. I expect it will be a lot like the great experience I had with the Power BI course: A great chance to learn a topic, get hands-on experience and do it on my own schedule from anywhere with an internet connection. There is a cost for the verified certificates, but at $29 to $99 a course, that's still a reasonable cost if this content helps you build your professional skills.]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/justmeetingsnoactualwork/power-bi-can-analyze-your-tweets Wed, 06 Jul 2016 14:58:16 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/justmeetingsnoactualwork/?p=725 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/samlester/2016/07/06/create-your-personalized-twitter-analytics-dashboard-in-power-bi-in-10-minutes/ It's a nice way to answer some questions you might not have thought to ask -- like which day you most often tweet. I don't do a lot on twitter, but even with a limited data set it is interesting see I take Wednesday "off" from tweeting, don't do much on Thursdays but tweet a lot more on Friday and Saturday. Sam's also done a nice job to let you download the template and walk you through getting your own data and importing into. Just a couple of clicks and you should be able to make your own dashboard!          ]]>