Moving the Chains

With many upcoming rivalry football games over Thanksgiving weekend across the US, I feel the football analogy is on point for this edition of my newsletter. While I'll refrain from any Apple Cup (the rivalry game for the State of Washington) humor, I will use this as a chance to say GO HUSKIES!!

Growing up in a European family, I'll also admit that I knew very little about American football until I got to college. At one point, someone explained it to me as "a bunch of big guys pushing against a bunch of big guys going the other way." Football is played in a series of downs. The team with the ball has four tries to close the gap on the line ten yards down in front of them. Once and if they get past these ten yards, the chains move. And so on.

Here's how I apply my (limited) knowledge of football to other things in life.

"Life's a game of inches"

Working with technology is a lot like football if we think of it in inches. Every project I've done, regardless of my role in it, has been done step-by-step. We need to figure out how to do it one piece at a time to get there. The end result of the project isn't accomplished overnight but rather by taking it as a series of much smaller steps.

Football to Power BI

There are many analogies between football and data science and analytics. There are also analogies that we can define between football and Power BI. Here are a few tricks to try out in Power BI that don't take a long time to set up, but make a huge difference in the outcome of a project.

Dynamic Axes Lines

We can move the starting and ending position values for both the x-axis and the y-axis. This can become quite helpful in scenarios like ones where we want to have more control over the range of values that appear on the axes. Using the right scale of values can make a big difference in terms of how the end user perceives what we're communicating to them. To do so, we want to create a DAX measure that returns a constant value that we can add conditionally directly to the formatting options for each axis of our visual.

Dynamic Constant Lines

Similarly, we can also use dynamic DAX measures that return a constant value for other parts of our visuals within Power BI. We can use them to configure dynamic constant lines that change in our visual if we change a slicer or the data we're filtering over for example.

Dynamic Titles

We can change the titles accordingly with what we select in our view in Power BI. Unlike the dynamic axes ranges and dynamic constant lines, titles will typically be text, and more often than not for me, a concatenation of text and values formatted as text.

Dynamic Field Parameters

And now for one of my favorite Power BI features. Field parameters! It's also the most recent video my Power BI Weekly series. Field parameters are a game changer because they let us build more efficient and compact views for example where we give the end user control over what they want to see in the fields within data visualizations on the page.

I first learned about field parameters in Power BI not long after they came out earlier this year. They've been one of my favorite features ever since. In the latest video of the Power BI Weekly series, I show how we can use this feature to do amazing things in Power BI.

One note, though, is that field parameters aren't officially part of Power BI yet. In order to use them, we first need to enable them through the Preview features menu.

Coming Up!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US! Also, wishing everyone a good Thanksgiving even those abroad who decided to hunt for a turkey at their local grocery store in a foreign land. I'm working on the time series course for LinkedIn Learning right now (it's a bit of a mad dash to get across the finish line), and I'm excited to share that I'll be continuing the Power BI Weekly series next year!

-HW