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New On Power BI Showcase – Creating Insightful Documentation

by | Announcement, Power BI

Preparing detailed documentation for your Power BI reports is just as important as making the report itself. That’s why we’ve added three new entries to our Power BI Showcase that shows great ways to document a Power BI report.

Yes, these new entries are actual reports about other reports. Documentation like this is extremely helpful especially if you’re collaborating with other teams. With proper documentation, other users can check on the different elements that go into the report and can better understand how everything was put together.

Documentation can also be a great learning tool for other people who want to learn best practices especially in terms of report development. That’s why we believe that these reports deserve a spot in our Power BI Showcase.

Power BI Showcase

The Power BI Showcase features downloadable reports and dashboards that Power BI users can use for hands-on practice. It’s a great way to analyze how each of these unique reports were created, helping users pick up a trick or two in terms of report development.

Data Documentation Dashboard

This data documentation dashboard gives a dynamic visual overview of the elements used to put together the reference report. The design is highly intuitive and even provides a data dictionary showing every table, column, measure, and other elements used.

power bi showcase

There is also an entire page focused on the relationships in the model. It specifies the columns involved, the cardinality for each relationship, and security and cross filtering behavior.

power bi showcase

The 3rd page shows some best practices in terms of rules category and rules severity. It also specifies if each entry has a fixed expression or not. It also allows users to filter specific entries based on these three parameters.

power bi showcase

The 4th page shows the dependency among the different elements in the report. These can be filtered on the left pane based on table, object, and object type.

Each of these pages can be accessed through the icons serving as page navigation on the leftmost part of each page.

Model Documentation Dashboard

What stands out about the model documentation dashboard is the minimalist design. It uses a combo stacked chart and displays the DAX expressions used with descriptions for each one to give a clearer look at how it was put together and what it’s for.

power bi showcase

Hovering the pointer over any part of the chart gives more information on that specific point. It also gives some recommendations on next steps you can follow.

power bi showcase

The report also comes with slicers to narrow down the data as needed.

Report Documentation Showcase

This is an interactive visual depiction of report documentation, centered on key performance metrics. The creative aspect of this documentation adds to the entire user experience without sacrificing the intuitiveness of the report.

power bi showcase

Starting off with the Context page, it gives a detailed overview of the project description, audience, problem solving approach, and validation.

power bi showcase

A separate Overview page also shows the numbers involved, like the total number of measures, calculated columns, number of tables, hidden columns, and more.

The Details page was divided into 6 areas – Model, Tables, Reports, Relationships, Query Dependencies, and Measures.

Clicking on any of these buttons show more information about which parts of the model fall under any of these categories.

The Performance page dives into how each page and visual in the original report performs, mostly in terms of how long each element renders and loads.

Finally, the last page looks at the best practices applied to formatting, maintenance, naming conventions, and performance.

The Power BI Showcase

This set of reports added to the Power BI Showcase highlights the fact that Power BI is even more dynamic than we think it is. We usually see it as an effective tool to report and visualize data. But as these new entries show, Power BI is also effective in further discussing those reports in detail.

Make the most out of the fact that these reports can be downloaded as .pbix files. This makes the Power BI Showcase course a great way to level up your skills in Power BI. You can even upgrade to On-Demand to get the best value, knowing that this gives you access not just to the showcase, but to other resources that can make you the best data professional you can possibly be.

All the best,

Enterprise DNA Team

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