Introducing PowerOps! (A NEW Productivity Tool for Power BI Developers)

[Music] hey everybody welcome so today's video recording is going to be something a little bit special I'm actually here with B who has um entered my universe somewhat recently and actually shown me a really cool new tool that is going to be really useful for managing uh essentially powerbi files and project files now I could easily uh in many ways I could try to describe this but the tool itself has a lot of different features and implementations so rather than me getting into it in a recorded video I felt it would be uh beneficial uh bring you on and actually have you walk through a lot of this stuff and give us kind of an in-in tutorial of what's coming out uh in a few weeks I believe so this is a new tool that will be available as a like a SAS platform sometime in December is that correct um that's right R thanks for having me absolutely yeah and um if you want to start like I do with a lot of live streams but also recorded formats so give a little introduction about yourself and then I'm really excited to kind of see uh a detailed walkthrough of what this tool can offer sure sounds good so my name is Vijay haand so I'm based in New Jersey so uh I run a company called Tris so which specialized in bi space and uh we were ventured into powerbi like four years ago when we venture into powerbi we have seen that there's a some gaps that my clients are looking for so then we started building some tools for them internal link but when we see the growth of the tool then we forther everybody's benefit we thought to make this tool publicly available for people to use it so that's the background beautiful and the it's something that definitely I think came out of left field for a few of us but it seems like there's been a lot of love and effort put into this so really um I think excited to see this initial release that will be out in beta um in December for some early testers but then also just how much this will be growing in the next 6 to 12 months um but I certainly learn a lot by viewing and and being able to to see things so whenever you're ready we can hop into the demo and just kind of get a nice walkthrough of like just all the bells and whistles that this uh this new tooling platform has sure definitely there are like uh 20 people worked on this tool for like almost two years of time so yeah definitely worthwhile so I'll let's get over to the demo so I'll just quickly go over the what's the tool about before I go ahead with the demo so the tool is aimed to provide a single platform an end to end platform to analyze compare optimize Version Control and deploy the power V reports so as a part of phase one the current features we are offering in this tool is analyze compare and best practices so analyze you can analyze every bit of information in your report and model including the difficult to view features like bookmarks filters and dependencies as well whereas compare provides you like a bit of comparison between the two different versions of the reporter model and you can easily identify the changes whereas in best practices it automatically evaluates the best practices against your report or model and you can identify the areas of concern and also you can have an option to create and edit rules for both reports and also the models by the tool it is has zero Touch version controls so you really don't need to learn about gate or asure devops to use the tool so it automatically Version Control your reports and it also makes your repos the workspace sync ready from Microsoft so that's the back yeah the rule edits are one of the things that I'm certainly um most excited to see continue to evolve because it just like the best practices analyzer and tabular editor being able to have your own version of the truth of what you want to look for I think is going to be really important with this stuff so I love that that it seems to already be off offered to a degree and will continue to evolve as people start to to create their own rule sets from that yeah definitely so when we'll get to there so I I'll show you what rules we have and what we have in plan as well beautiful all right let's get to the demo this is the power ops website it's the power ops. app which you can go ahead and sign up for beta today it's up and running so right now I'm already registered so uh it directly logs me in so I can just click on sign in okay so we have two options to use in power Ops which is the GitHub and Azure devops and it will work for both so user can log in using either of the options so the prere site is only the either the user need to have a GitHub account or an AO devops account and once you register for beta so the user can log in it for the demonstration purpose I'm logging in with azure devops so when I click on it it automatically takes me into the AO devops and since I already have a login so and it's showing me the details of it um this is how you land it U since I already have an existing report it's showing up here but as a new user you go ahead and start with creating a new repo so this is the plus icon which where you can start creating a repo so where it asks for your repo names it usually a workspace name so for the demonstration I'm just starting up with today's date V at 1120 I'm just adding a repo name here and any files to add I have choose an option to create a blank repo or I can choose an option to add a new files as well this connects via the the what you logged in with so if you if you had connected asure devops uh or if you logged in with Microsoft it would have autoc connected to your devops and shown you a list of repos and branches and because you're connecting to GitHub similarly it's basically connecting to that and and pushing all uh and pulling from from the back end of whatever system you logged in with correct um that's right but if you have the same files according to the workspace sync ready so only those files will going to show up so other files is going to ignore the powerups is going to ignore if even if you have it in the aure devops but whatever you upload from here it's going to show up here okay so it's it's things that so the only thing Expos or unhidden specifically will be the ones uploaded from here versus Legacy ones which might have followed a different practice or or something else that just wouldn't be um wouldn't Expos exactly so I'll just create a like I'm not choosing s option for for now so I'll just use a blank report to get started so when I go ahead and click on create so it created a repo for me and it's a blank repo because we haven't added any files now we can go ahead and start adding a file when you click on add a file you will have three options to choose from you can have an option to add a full report or a report or a data set so you can upload uh even in the data set side you have an options like dot data set folder you can upload or a Bim file or a timel as well uh when it comes to what file formats we support we support pbip today uh pbip is the Microsoft recent introduced format where you can save your uh let me save a file for you to show uh let's say this is a powerb report that we have so sample Power report you can save as that file and save as that as a PBP folder itself so let's uh let me save this into the a folder called sales I'm just saving it as PB IP here the benefit of pbip is that it stores the skeleton information it doesn't store any data compared to PBX so that's what we would like to keep it keep it in our GitHub or ASO devs so for example now I'm browsing it I'm loading the pbpm which I saved it earlier so I can just select the folder the sales folder which I want to upload I click on upload and select upload here and click on create now it adds that file behind the screens and connecting to my devops and adding all this content of pbip into my a devops git now as this loading curiously the um if you have your your GitHub repository sync to your computer uh in a way that if you just open the project file made and edit it would automatically push the changes back into the system um would that uh would this recognize a change that happened in your repository of a file that was already in this list or would you you need to use uh this specifically to push the changes through um in terms of anytime you've made a an edit to the report or the data set part of the project file so it works in both ways like either you can start with from here in power offs you can make an edits or if you are using a Microsoft recently released workspace integration method and if you're using app. power.com to make edits to your report and that gets sync to your version control system so that the power offs also recognizes the changes and shows you the latest information beautiful okay so like you you add a new page to a report you publish it to a workspace that's synced with a get repository that already has these items in here so there's already sales and return sample it will recognize that that was updated in a workspace that's attached to the repository that is essentially exposed here that you that you useed the add option for okay definitely yeah so it works in both ways cool um so now now that the file loaded so we upload a full report which has both report and data model so you're going to see two files here so and when we click on it and uh it shows to the analyze option before I go to analyze option I'll just show you how it is version controls before uh let's go to the project where this my aure devops and I'm just trying to search for the file that I just uploaded uh what the repo name I created is 1120 so so this is the repo that I created just now and you can see that it just uploaded all the files in here excellent so that's how it manages it automatic so you really don't need to do any commits to gate or it automatically commits to it so it it takes care of it like it added what files and it you have a commit message and commit IDs as well here all right so let's get into analyze so the first section is analyze section so rather than just version controlling the file it also does the analyze part as well so you can see in summary we have two different sections report and data model it analyz every bit of information about report like total Pages total visual visual types custom visuals bookmarks and you can also see the visual type account and visuals by Pages as well and objects web pages too similarly if you click on data model it gives you the high level information about the data model how many tables you have how many columns data sources and many other right columns by table data source connectivity method and objects by table as well the summary page so and to mention as well the the Safety and Security with this like the fact that you're working with project files means that there's like the the Le the least secure thing that might possibly be coming out with this is maybe the actual Dax code or the M code but there's no actual data that is coming out of it like you said there shells they are the it's the metadata for the model it's the metadata for the report but they're um the data set itself is stored separately so anything that is um integrated or and or uploaded to this does not do does not ever touch or come near the actual uh the data inside of the data sets that's right so we don't store any data at all so all it's just the data and this is what the Microsoft also recommend to use the pbip because pbip is going to be the default format from Microsoft for Version Control so that's what we're going to use it and moreover and as a tool we don't even store any data the data lives in your own as your devops the metadata as well so we just read it the tool just read it from there and process it here exactly I think it it follows a a similar process to some of the other SAS tools that I've seen where the the the UI reads it as far as to be able to display it but everything is completely stored within tenant um wherever either git or in Azure devops in case correct within the customer owned space on their own Azure devops yeah all right let's dive into report section so in report section we have multiple subsections where you have Pages you can see clearly like how many pages you have and uh what are the details and we Tred to uh show it in more powerbi developer friendly format like uh to show the pce order and Landing pace and what are the other dimensions uh if you look at the raw Json it has more of like uh some uh coding words like it won't say the page order it will have some page ordinal or it the landing page say p page ordinal or it will not have the color codes exactly it will have theme color ID as three or four you really don't know the exact color code but we put in lot of effort to get it exactly as how it shows in report it shows you all the details the report layout file too is incredibly messy so he I mean it's it's designed for computers not for human eyes at all so I can speak for firstand experience on the difficulty of parsing the uh the Escape Json um that's in there into anything manageable or readable so this is uh really really cool that you're able to to break everything out from the report layer which has not really been done by anyone until recently yeah U so and it shows you all the details of what like we tried we put an effort to make sure none of the smallest details is missed out over there and U it shows you like even the border on or off it will show you everything as need as you see it in Pia desktop so the filter cards and it'll show you the different text fonts or whatever you're using it so this is just a page section let's dive into other sections as well so so this is a visual section let me dock this on the left side so you can see there are Pages what kind of pages you have and if the page is hidden so it will show you this Hidden Icon here and on the right side you have this visuals and type and Fields being used you can have measures it's showing in orange color you have a legend here which shows what so for example this particular chart and this has a visual title as this and there's a type of the visual and this are the columns that is being used and these is the visual filters that is being applied so it shows you a clear picture of what you have and everything you see in power offs is filterable you can just click on it and filter it any part of it and it is also even exportable like you can export into csw and Excel and you can even have a column selector if some of the columns you don't like to see or you want to have it on so you can always select it so and we also have like the data and we also have formatting options as well so where you can see the uh the formatting options for this particular visual so you can click on it and it will show you uh when you click click on this particular icon so it will show you the the visual formatting of that what are the different settings that it has okay and that that's pulling out a little bit of like exposing somewhat how the the Json is essentially storing that but still in a readable um a much more readable format for for people that wanted to see all these different properties that have been applied in the uh the format pain or theond object formatter um depending on which version they're using exactly and we may have try to do some other uh UI modifications in the future like to make it more easy to read than this but it's still readable for the by the users so um so there are visual interactions as well so you can see the what kind of interactions you can have for on the visual side so U uh it will show up like outbound interactions for example this particular chart has an outbound interactions like a cross filter with these two other visuals and it has an inbound interactions with these to visual so it will show you whether it's not applicable or it has any any sort of interaction so EXC I mean and I know that's that's something that can can imagine even for best practices and analyzing that is like looking at reports and seeing if anything's cross- highlighting if things should be cross filtering and vice versa but getting the the separation at the top level of outbound and inbound can be very useful to see how many touch points a particular visual has on the page yeah definitely so you can even can see accidentally if we have something that not supposed to filter other visuals if it's filtering identify it right from here and we also have General section it just talks about General properties of the visuals and just whether it's height and weight and other all other properties that it has so we also have wireframe view so you can click on this visual view that shows you a wireframe view of the the visuals and you can even Mouse over on it and you can see like what fields that this this particular visual is using it and what kind of filter it has as well go are the so the filter is useful and then the other ones just showing you the the measures that are in being used in it yeah the fields and measures like the fields okay so everything in the wells that would be you know any of the wells including I'm guessing tool tips that's right including the TOs would that capture anything in the visual level filters let's just assume you had a a measure filter that was the visual level um on that would that show up in the little um uh would that show up in the fields drop down there yeah even if you have visual level filters um it it will show up and the filter section if this visual has anything but this is only shows up like if you added anything like to the field level so let's say if it's a tool tape could be like a measure or category or any other like small multiple fields or anything like very cool and you can switch between the other Pages you can see the other details like U all other pages is going to show even um even the tool tip pages also is going to show up in here if you have anything and uh let's move on to the custom visuals so the custom visuals tab will going to show you like what are the used custom visuals there are two tabs here used and unused used going to show you like what are the used custom visuals in your report and it'll even show you whether it's certified or not which one say this um do you do a a web scrape to determine this information or how how much of this is contained in the custom viz File versus you're doing a lookup um in the existing repository that's in the app Source store uh we do a lookup as well on the existing like some of the information is not directly comes from the uh the ra JSM files that are included in PB so we actually do to get this information to the latest information especially the radians I would assume and looks like the image Pro by Cloudscape has like a link so I'm guessing that takes you to the appsource link exactly and over on the far right yeah that's right so you can even go click on it and go to that particular the users source of that uh whatever the the particular custom visual is and you can even app Source such and it'll clearly help you to understand how many of the certified custom visuals we using and how many are not and even the cases like there could be some unused visuals so the some visuals that we have added but we are not using it in our report which can I can imagine at some point um build in and because you there there's there's organizational visuals you know that that are essentially the ones that are approved and I can even imagine best practice word somebody could come into this platform they could you know pick from a list like whatever is available in appsource they could re uh they could set whatever their uh their or visuals are that they have actually in in their tenant and then this thing could potentially even flag uh whether or not an organizational uh visual was or was not used like if somebody used a visual outside of what's supposed to be used you could get like a flag for that right so yeah that that we can do that as well yeah that would be awesome yeah cool right let's move on to filters so filters we have four different sections visual filters space filters report filters and drill through filters you can clearly see V visual filters like which visuals are using what are the filters and what are the their definitions so and these are everything um from the I'm just looking so visual page and report so these are the three scoped filters the filter pane that we have so the visual level filters so things applied to a single visual things apply to the page and the report and then the dral through fil filters well um on on the pages okay so then and slicers wouldn't be on this page um essentially that would be C that would be captured separately on the visuals and then interaction section exactly so the slice is going to be the visual so but if you apply any specific filters on any part of the visuals that's going to show up here either visual yeah on the P slicer does not equal blank or something like that that's true yeah any cut any definitions of the filters that you have set that's going to show up here so the pce filters is going to show up like the all the page level filter definitions and Report level filters is going to show up like the any report level filter definitions here and drill through too um so we also have bookmarks and um so the bookmarks we all know that it's very difficult to see the features like with a black box we really don't kind of see what's happening inside the bookmarks so but we put in a lot of effort to get it right and able to pass the bookmark and show it in like more user friendly formats as you can see on the right side you can see the when you click on this plus icon so this is going to show up like all the bookmark details like what The Bookmark name of it and whether it is closing the filter pan or opening the filter pan and what kind of report filters it's applied and what kind of bookmark details it has the certain actions that bookmark does it when you click on this bookmark this particular button is getting hidden and we also have the other visual that is showing up and but these are the columns that has and every bit of action so you can just D like scroll down and see all the action that bookmark does and it's even clickable with other things as well you can click on the other ones and you can see a bit of bookmark information here and like I mean the the amount of time that I spent last year I tried to to make something not not the UI but just a powerbi report that at least spat it out and playing English and figuring out the bookmark connections and actually getting the right visual names and like it was a it was a nightmare to do it like I I got about 80% of the way there um and then ended up getting caught up with other stuff but but it's it's not easy to properly map all of this because bookmarks are probably the most complicated thing in the report layer in powerbi because there's so many touch points that do a bunch of other stuff um and like and it's you know basically taking a snapshot of the report page but every single filter every object every relationship like all of that like it's a lot of it's a lot of code that's in that file so I'm very impressed that you're were able to print this out in as plain English as possible considering how complex bookmarks themselves are yeah so nowadays like people use bookmarks for every sort of thing they want to achieve it bookmarks is the pretty much sought after for every everything that they want to do it in PBI so it's used for all different kind of purpose uh today so to see what exactly the bookmark does it and there is no way to see it so far so but this gives you the view of like the bookmark uh what kind of actions it is part of yeah this is really cool I'm I'm impressed that you you managed to get this much out this much detailed in just the bookmark section um because I yeah it's a black box um for sure until we get any kind of report definition language hopefully someday yeah and uh it even adds this icons whether it's a custom visual or what kind of visual is and it even adds the icons for whether it's a column or a measure or whether it's ascending descending or hidden or all those things so to make it more easy read for the users that's really cool all right and um the other part here is like it shows you the other information whether it is the bookmark is getting applied on selected visuals or all visuals and such sort of things and let's move on to actions so actions is going to show you like what kind of action that particular thing is doing for example in this net sales we have a button and it is calling this bookmark and this is the bookmark value is that bookmark name is that so there a list of all the actions that we have it on the report excellent we also have sing slicers so syn slicers is like it's going to again like show you in the Pia developer friendly format as the way you see it there and uh for this page so we have the slicer fields and it's going to show you whether sync visible or the field changes or filter changes and Etc right and we also have Navigators so it shows you like the page Navigators and bookmark Navigators page of Navigators going to show you like uh that particular page whe tool tip page is enabled or not or show all by default is enabled or not so what pages we are showing in that using the space Navigator it's going to show you all the information and same goes with the bookmark Navigator if you're using it and what bookmark you're using it as well right yeah go ahead yeah this wraps of the report section so we can dive into the model section now so model section we have a lot more things here so about the model you can see all the tables what kind of tables what kind of storage mode whether it's hidden table feature table or date table how many columns you have hierarchies measures partitions annotation and a lot more and uh we also have a model view as well if you click on so it shows you the model view as exactly you see it in powerbi we put in lot of effort to get it right uh it wasn't easy to get it right like the way it looks in PBI U so we uh custom designed this and and we're able to get it right U so you can see clearly like whether it's hidden or not you can Mouse over on it you can Mouse over on the relationships to see what kind of oh wow relationships it has and the uh I'm assuming the table placement is the same so like you how you've chosen to do to the height the width and the location do the lines actually follow the same direction that you would see or yeah exactly so this shows up the same way that you stored it in powerbi let's say if you place this table somewhere here in powerbi with this lens so it shows you the same exact way in power opso as well so it uses the diagram layout. JSM there is a Json file that comes with the PBP so we use that file to process this positions and the uh size and we're able to replicate the same to give the same view for the As for the user's choice if you had multiple diagrams um tabs on the on the bottom in your model view uh will that capture those or is that like an upcoming thing uh exactly so we already in work in progress so we are able to show you the first one but we're almost done so we probably will have something that in in a week or so so you're going to see multiple tabs also here okay excellent all right cool so coming out of the diagram view so um so columns is like Pages you have col like in tables here and you can see the columns what kind of columns you're using whether it's hidden and what data types and everything right so all bit of information about columns you can see uh what kind of format it is so and so and many other information that you can find from here um yeah so and we have hierarchies as well so coming to hierarchies so you can see the the table name hierarchy name what level is like this is pretty interesting so you can see clearly like what what kind of ordinal it has and levels as well so all the hierarch is going to list down in a proper way and which is easy to read and we also have parameters so you can see the field level parameters and numeric range parameters so field parameters is like uh what are the parameter fields and whether AO and whether they added to the slice and the PA all those information you can see and numeric range parameters if you have anything it's going to show you as well uh we also have data groups if you have any data groups that has been added and if you have any list or a bin oh the um using the yeah that not very it's not used often I don't think but um when you right click and create a new a group which is either using bins or categories right that's right even if you have that the power up still going to show up excellent all right so the data sources so you can see the what kind of sources that you're using it like uh in this example we just using Excel sources like with different tables so it's going to show up the data source okay and we also have a relationship information as well so see um from and two which table there's more like a Microsoft way the recently added to see the relationship so we are trying to show it on the same way I mean it's essentially what I like I wish the the manage relationships you and powerbi did look like um because it's it's you get a list but you get very little metadata so you don't know the relationship type you don't know the direction um and a bunch of other stuff which is kind of annoying so it's nice to get a a summary breakdown like this um for sure yeah definitely so it even tell you whether it's an active relationship or not and a lot of other information that relate to the relationships you can find it here and we also have refresh policies and we also have perspectives that what kind of perspectives that it has um yeah that covers most of the data model information and we categorized all the Dax related information like measures calculate columns into the Dax section so in Dax section you're going to find like measures calculate columns calculate tables calculation groups and coming to measures for example this particular report has 59 measures so you can say find everything here and you can find the format of it also um and other other information of the measure so you can even copy the measure and you can even do a formatted copy as well that's really cool and it's um it's I'm assuming just use the index format yeah so it is internal formatter running the tax and against the formatter to format it accordingly awesome all right so it shows you all the information you can even download the all the measures and you can even filter a measure that you like and see the information accordingly and we also have calculated columns it will show you that if you have any calculated columns here and there is calculator tables you can find the calculator tables that has been there similarly you can also find the calculation groups and anything using Dax anything that is has a Expressions Dax expression so this will be coming under Dax section so even the kpis as well there is a way that you can create a kpis from the tablet so even those things going to show up here that's super cool all right let's so far we have seen the report data model and Dax now let's get to something more interesting so uh to find the dependencies in the data it's like a lineus so you can find the dependencies like for example the model dependencies so you can find like which measures are built based on what other columns or what other measures being used so that you can find it in the model dependency section so it will clearly show you like how this built and the orange ones are measures the blue ones or columns and if you have like purple ones or calculate columns and the red ones of the table columns so you can see those things and let's say if I want to find out like this net sales per month how it's being built so you can just click on it it shows you the flow even you can right click on it and say filter that is going to give you the preview like what for that so net sales is using the amount and Status columns and uh there are other measures that are built on top of it which is the last 12 months um and looks like net Sals prior month net Sals variance and a few others um but those then also combine the the date uh column probably with the date ad functions okay so that it you get to see both the columns and the uh the the measure dependencies all the way down the pipeline now if if you had a if you had a table reference in one of your measures you would probably have in your Legend a table option like count rows against sales or something like that um would you have an additional um uh I guess color and object type yes if you have any tables also it's going to show up the the tables in here and it's going to show the connection to the tables but primarily it the intention here is like to show all the uh the uh how the dependencies in the from the child dependencies like also the parent dependencies test that's really cool I mean I think it it helps show you the it's an impact analysis that you could do in a way yeah yeah it helps with the impact assessment like for example if you want to make a changes to the this particular measure now you know which me other measur going to be impacted by this and that search bar that means you could put another measure in there if you wanted to right right so let's say if I want to search for like net sales or when you start typing it's going to show up like what are the matching things so you can even select like other parts of it like for example I'm selecting another meic called net sales it's going to show you together now as a everything as a combination yeah whatever is and you can see like there's a lot of touch points for net sales like that propagates down to another 25 30 different measures I think in the model yeah yeah that's very cool I like that a lot yeah so it'll give you the full lineage of that and so that you don't miss out anything if you're making a changes that you know all the dependencies that it has right so you can even just not click on from the here you can even start from here as well like if you know a measure that you want to search for you can just start typing it and select it and it's the same experience again like it's going to filter for that particular measure to see the dependences all right and we also have a table View for the same so if somebody's more comfortable with table view they can and you can even search for this one too the measure names are referencing and referenced objects as well um so let's go to the report dependencies as well uh report dependences is a one step above so you can clearly see here uh right now so far in the model dependences we have seen measures columns and calculated columns and report dependencies is a one step above so you can going to see the visuals and Pages as well so for example the this particular measure so we want to find out like what kind of for example the same net sales we want to find out like where it's being used in which uh which visuals and what pages so you can just right click and say filter and it's going to tell you like okay so this is being used in these visuals like the green ones are visuals and these are the pages so you can the ARs coming in are what's using it and the arrows going out are what it's using good perfect okay so and then that and this is direct dependencies so like the these are the number of objects that are uh directly using the net sales measure not necessarily like net sales prior month but the uh um pointing directly to this exact measure anywhere in the report exactly so we will add option here to find an indirect dependency as well so for now it shows the data yeah and in the model side it will show you the indirect ones as well whatever it is being used as well so but we will have the toggle so you can see both direct and indirect all right and uh we also have power query dependencies so power query depends is same as like how you see it in powerbi so you can see that how these what are the source of it and what are the different um files that we using and what are the tables that we're loading it from where so straightforward and uh let's get into the M queries so if you see the M queries so there are like it will show you all the M queries that is enabled and disabled as well uh you can even click on it and it will even show you that um particular M query whatever is in the format and the format also is going to be added so you can even have a copy and you can do a format copy of that inquery as well whatever the being used and you can even download them query um in a text file as you like and even you can start searching it also um so if you see particular uh a text and you can even have like a match case and uh or to match the whole word uh so you can even do that as well from the search and you can even download it uh all the M queries into one file if you would like or you can even download it an individual as well that's really cool right so you can even find the dis disabled M queries too so what are the M queries that are disabled but it's being used so that you can find it from here too uh so we also have um for for M queries does it uh does it flag at all any orphaned queries so if if if it's disabled and also not referenced anywhere um I know that's a that's something that I have to to agree like if I'm ever auditing somebody's file like uh which I do all the time for clients one thing that I kind of have to do is just right click and you just select delete and if it lets you delete it that means it's not being touched otherwise it will say can't delete because query X is referencing this um but I do know that it's a pain point to to get rid of the cobwebs um so is that something that you're considering like planning on being able to like flag at some point yeah so we can do that since we already have this the metadata so yeah definitely we'll try to add that feature in near future awesome cool and um coming to roles we have like both RLS and OLS setup so you can see what RLS roles that are being used and what kind of OLS roles also that's being used right so and we also have info section as the last section in the analyze so info section gives you like bite-sized insights about like about your report so what kind of PB P version that you're using what kind of theme it is and what is the model compatibility level and data source version long ways and it also gives you facts like whether you're using Auto time intelligence enabled or not so so enabling Auto time intelligence is bad so if you even if something is true so you can find it right from here and you can find all other interesting facts about the your report so that covers the whole analyze section and it just when you upload a particular a pbip uh a file it it just not loading it into your devops as your devops get and it also analyzes and shows you all these facts instantly that's really cool and I mean I think you you contining to to repeat myself on this but like you You' seem to pretty much have mapped out and and provide a summary page for every single piece of the um the data set and. report uh file that you have that's in in the project file plus also mapping out any of the custom visuals that are in those folders so it I'm assuming there's essentially nothing that's in the the project file that is not being documented and then um reported on in this interface is that correct uh that's right so we want to capture all the metadata in here so that we can use it in the next section which we're going to go over in the compass section so so that we don't miss out anything in the compare that's yeah um well I'm I'm definitely like excited to see the diff compare if you actually have that as well so um let's take a look at that that' be as I've been going yeah let me load a few other files I'll just show you the experience so now I loaded the one file in the bran so let's load another files too um let's load I'm just loading the adventure sales which is a standard demo file from Microsoft so it's easy so you can add any number of files using the same plus icon and it keeps adding it so as you can see it's created again and you can see the files here as well and the same same thing you're going to see it here if I refresh now you're going to see the adventure sales also here nice and uh you can even create a branches so this is a branch you can add a file to a branch or you can even create a branches as well let's create a Dev branch and out of main branch I'm not adding any new files but I just click on Create and creates the branch mhm and you have two branches now one is Main Branch you have the files and Dev Branch you of these files you can even oh and it does it automatically create a Dev copy of everything from the main branch when you do that yes yeah now you can if you refresh it again here so you can see there's a main branch here but if you click now you see a Dev Branch also which is just now creat nice okay and U you can even delete the files as well so let's say I don't want to delete anything in the main branch but I want to delete from the Del Branch so you can just come here and click on delete delete so it will give you a prompt or you want to permanently delete it so you can click on it yes so it's going to delete the files as well and I can reupload another version of the file that I have new one so for example I'm uploading the version two of the same click on create just take a moment to create it so it created now so now you can see the dev has version two and the main branch has the version one of the FL right you can even compare and now let's go to the compare and see how it does so I'm comparing against the version two of this and Main Branch version one and clicking on compare button so it tries to compare every bit of information between these two different versions and uh it will list down what it found right so it will list down all the sections so you can find like in the report section it has six findings and out of six findings three are in Pages section one in visual section and another one is in filters so s slices so it gives you every bit of details in in in in a clear way for you to understand like for example uh the for example this particular one uh see the color has been changed you can even click on this modified button in the center that gives you a drill drill down view of what it di so in this example in the P to all it changed was the canvas color okay so for for people who've ever used the um deployment pipelines this this interface will definitely look familiar for them um where you have the the summary and then kind of the detail uh diff comparison that that shows you what's been changed uh but you also manage to you you're not just showing the raw code of the line of code that's been changed but you you summarize it as something in a table yes U that's where the value add would be like so they're just not looking the R so but they're looking at the actual values that is being changed for example the report layer which the deployment P pipelines does not do that does a diff compare for the data set but you don't really know if thing changes have been made on the report uh when you do when you use deployment pipelines and push changes through yeah that's true so report layer doesn't have a like atle version of report layer today but it may come in sometime in future but still like it's still going to be helpful with because uh it's just not going to say theme color ID three or four it's actually going to show you the color codes that's being used and it's actually going to show you the actual visual names than showing some U go IDs in there so lot of stuff that makes it more user friendly to see and compare things we literally can compare apples to apples from the P desktop yeah know that's fantastic so it shows you like a bit information you can click click on it and you can see so this particular page name has got changed and it is no longer a landing page now so that's the difference here and you can also see in visuals and um for example under visuals this phace three we have a change here you can click on it and see what is a change so you can see that it was used to be a stag bar chart now it's a a chart so that's just a change there are no other changes here and you can even like uncheck it's currently shows only differences but even you can uncheck this and it shows you all other things which are unchanged as well which doesn't it determines when a visual changes because I'm assuming there's a unique visual ID when you first add the container and that visual ID stays the same when even as you switch the visual T from a bar to a column or something is that correct that's right yeah so there is a okay unique visual ID that we go by to identify the change that's how we able to identify when the the page name has changed yeah because I I know you have page ID and visual ID and I mean again even going just from my the background that I've had on trying to to hack apart bookmarks the complexity that I found on the fact that you create a visual on page one if you right click and copy the visual and paste it on page five visual ID doesn't change it it's still the same visual uh so I ended up personally having to concatenate the page ID and the visual ID together to get a true unique ID per whole report rather than per page because I was duplication issues but like there one of many complications that comes into appropriately displaying this and mapping it so this is it's very impressive yeah so we had that we also use the same combination to identify the uniqueness today so yeah you're exactly right there very very cool cool and it even have a visual comparison as well so you can see a visual View and you can clearly see what was before and what was recently added and even use that little um the placeholder icon that they essentially use before you fill the container yes U yeah we'll show you the red and the Border Lines to show it and um this is the wireframe view but uh in the table view you can also find like what is changed in the filter s slicers and uh even on the data model section side you can clearly see uh you can have a like visual view of data model changes as well but here if you can see that it's the there is a new table that got added and in these two tables we have some changes you can click on it and see there was used to be eight and there is an and one more new column that has been added and you can clearly click on this and uh you can clearly see the differences in a uh let me zoom in and show you oh you color that here too so you you have like the green because the relationship is new so essentially any anything that's modified gets an orange color deleted would be red if there is a deletion and then green would um is both for the relationships plus the tables and that's that's nice so you can click on this and you can see what other the information of the newly added table and uh you can even see this particular is like orange color so which shows that it is modified you can click on it and see what exactly I changed so this used to be like summarized by you can see that and even the same goes with the column so what's the column information that got added so it it shows you like a a bit of information of that particular model what what is actually changed for example this got mode here so you can click on it and see oh this one this the column that got remed so this gives you a clear idea on how that changes are there in the model level and you can also see it on the TBL view as well so you can see the column details and what are the column that got added and what got removed and Etc same goes with hierarchies and relationships wherever it find changes it's is going to show up and we also have Dax thing so let's say for example this is the something a new measure got removed and uh and if you look at this example this expression got changed okay yeah calculated and okay so the source and Main so the so the left one's the older one the right source is vice versa but it uh it went from having a relation use relationship added to not essentially that's right so any Chang that you do to a access PS also you can find right from here um in this example I don't have it but even you can find the differences in the bookmarks as well so uh imagine if you removed an action accidentally on a bookmark or let's say filter pain is uh opened uh when you're making an updates to The Bookmark accidentally but and you saved the report you can even identify F the changes like that that's cool okay a PA that does both back and front and is really useful to have at the same time so I mean there's there's separate tools that do both but being able to kind of just have all of it in one interface goes a long way for for being a timesaver um and also just if a client says Hey something broke can you go figure it out this makes it really easy to like give me both versions of the file and I can quickly throw it together and do a comparison so I'd be curious to know as a as as a case study with this um generally speaking you have everything uh branched and version and and all that and here what it be possible um for a comparison because let's just assume that you had two temp versions they don't actually need to be committed they don't need to be saved but you would just like to you know um for 20 minutes you just want to compare a and B and then immediately when you're done just have them just those versions be deleted uh as a as a quick one-off comparison so I know now you can like click the plus icon you can add them in and then delete them when you're done but I uh I could Envision even a really useful way is like having an option to just upload temporarily the pbxes via the compare interface and then as soon as you close it it just basically deletes them when you're when you're done if you not doing any main versions yeah we're getting a desktop tool also desktop okay so when that is in place it just lets you do everything like without committing the stuff yeah I'm I'm looking forward to getting a dust because it'll also make it easier to commit um too in theory if you you just have the tool running in the background so you can just open it up whenever you need to you do anything with it true yeah for sure so we we we're going to get a desktop tool maybe in a month time so you see yeah cool so you can even see the changes in M queries for example M queries it says there is a change it says you can can drill into it you can click on this plus icon and it drill in to see exactly what has changed as well okay okay and it's just do like it s it does like the formats it and then show you the line comparisons of what's different yeah so exactly like it it doesn't show you everything else what it will show you the color code the parts that is exactly got changed can imagine Alex Powers would be very happy to see that cool um and we also have info section so it shows you a bit information but here is just the file name that got changed if you have any model compatibility changed or any other things PB version changed anything that's right from a top level like the ma Master data set settings okay show us default summarizations the is uh is encourag implicit measures in this list anywhere if you scroll down how curiosity uh filter type that would be one of the thing I could think about that would be beautiful on this list is the it's it's what's turned off when you create a calculation group the um discourage implicit measures so that way people can't use columns in the visual Wells anymore uh but it's like a it's like a model level setting yeah definitely we can add that that's a good point so we we'll definitely add that to the two uh so t or editor used question Mark um how can you tell if tab what's the flag that says yes tabular has been used on this model the measure thing yeah the Tor usually add an annotation into the whenever you save a model so okay so so there there's a little bit of uh notes in the code that actually indicates it's been something's been edited with that tool okay I didn't didn't realize that so nice it's I just learned something new there yeah cool and that's the compared part so you get the chance to compare every bit of information and clearly shows you like what information you have it the beauty of this is like you can peer review other people's work it's more of collaborative tool if it is a desktops tool you're going to see is only for yourself but uh now let's say you're leading a team so or you want to review other people's work too you can compare between the versions before you make a Deion so to see the exact changes that's happening no that's like I can see that as this as being very very useful and I mean end of the day the the thing that I I constantly do as a consultant is I need to audit files and uh make them better for clients so anything that can help me compare clean up automate and and improve uh without manual review certainly will save me a bunch of time and even from a a Administration and governance level I can see this being really useful for the workspace administrators or anyone else um or just reporting data set developers if they need to come back in six months and they're trying to remember two changes that they did three months ago between version A and B this will make it super easy to find that yeah definitely so this will be quite useful in that way um because I also used to run a bi project management uh as a manager so I know when I need to review my teams and all the time the bi tools is a black box you cannot really see what is being changed if somebody rce me to PBX fails to compare it's very hard to know what exactly has changed so but this lets you compare and both on the report and model side as well which is a good thing super cool and we haven't even gotten to the best practices but I you're saving the best for last I'm curious about this one yeah sure so let's get to it so we have best practices now and the the best part of this is like it automatically evaluates it so as soon as you upload all the three things that is ready for you to review so it evaluates the best practice against your report and uh in both on the report side of it and also from the model side of it U so today Tator also helps with the model side where you can see the model level and but with power offs you can do both report level and model level as well so you can click on so it will show you the W you P the glimpse of everything so report side how many rules and how many of failed so performance and this all the data model rules so you can clearly click click to see what has failed can click on that and clearly show you what exactly has passed and what is failed um so you can even expand it and you can see what actual one is failed for example this is as a relationship that has failed and it has a links to the how to fix that things as well and it'll also show you the past one so you can clearly focus on what you want to uh what rules that matter to for your organization uh for example if you recognition doesn't care about low medium and you only care about high so you can just just uncheck it so that shows okay so you can look at the worst perpetrators and everything okay so the high 15 means that there's a total of 15 rules across all of these categories it looks like correct that's right okay so formatting maintenance performance okay gotcha so then it will split into the ones where where it fil so then you can find out like okay performance there is a one uh rule like um that is not that is not done so it's failed or something so you can go ahead and look after those you can easily identify the areas of concern what really matters for your report so then you can make a decision whether you want to approve this particular report to go to production or not so you can easily review what is filed what is passed and with no descript yeah I'm just think there's so many rules that like just seem really interesting um but like the the this comes with these base set of rules that you have so far and I'm guessing this is going to continue to expand as you're um probably going to be doing the beta testing and um both from your team having new rules written and I'm guessing some Community input as well on what what some of the gaps might be on rules that um uh haven't been added yet but could be added as part of that core rule Set uh definitely so if you click on this edit rulle section you can see the rules we have today so you can clearly see like what kind of rules that we have like uh for report section and for performance section what is ciity and all those stuff so you can enable and disable the rules but all these rules today are just from the Microsoft posted like uh Michael kovaleski he he he posts the rules and which is pretty good like which we are using the same Json so today uh whatever he posted in the in the Microsoft his um his report best practices that he has you've essentially lifted and shifted that as the starting point too they use those display them here and then I'm guessing for the dox expressions and other stuff you're probably using some version of that like core best practices analyzer rule set that's on G GitHub for the um for the modeling as well think that that's true yeah so it's it's all the same rules that published in Microsoft Json file but the uh idea is like to give the system rules and we also have an option to add a new rules as well as you like so you can click on ADD Rule and you can add a check a sity level and you can write an Expressions as well these are all the same link expressions like the same way you write in Tator the same thing and you can even like use the bring the Tator rules and you can use it right here also it's the same way that you write a link expression you can validate the Expressions too so when you say expression and you mentioned t editor is it safe to assume this is running c yeah it's the same C link Expressions that you can write and validate it is there any type of um for is there any type of intellisense or function um popups that like help guide you on that or is there any plans for that yeah so we have putting together a documentation around it like how do you write a rules and what are the Scopes and how do you uh examples and uh which helps you with writing a better way of writing rules and at the same time we want to be in sync with what Microsoft has what TBL has as well so that's why we have chosen the C same link Expressions that is being already used in the market so well I mean in this way too if you have your own best practices analyzer on your on your own git repository that you use a tabular editor you could in theory I'm guessing you could point this to the repo and just say use this rule set for model um you yeah so you can even uh we will have a new import option so to get to a URL yeah okay yeah right now you can reset but we're going to have an import option where you can import a jsn files or you can even give a URL like you said so with the GitHub so that you can just directly import it that it makes me very happy to be able to get uh to have because I mean you're your the tool empowers a lot of people to be able to potentially start doing this a bit more easily on their own um rather than having to hire an expert to to fix a lot of stuff like they there's still plenty of space for having someone properly clean up your queries in terms of performance and a bunch of other stuff but you have tools like this you use something like the measure killer to help you get rid of unnecessary columns and measures the typical business analyst who is an intermediate at powerbi I think can get a lot closer to building a high quality data model than they been able to before before they have to spend you know thousands of dollars to pay an expert to go audit it like myself um to fix it so I I do like that you know you can they're giving better tools to to help the average uh developer who's just working for a company to be able to go and and do self- auditing um with a a service like this rather than having it to pay the uh the MVP level expert yeah true definitely so it gives an inside like to verify all the rules if when the we also added some report rules the same way that uh it's published in Microsoft side but there is a lot of chance that we can add some Community rules as well like the who experts like you so can suest some rules that make sense so probably we can definitely add those rules and users always have a choice to whether to what to enable and what to what works for them what doesn't work for them and they can edit it also for example um let's say the for the number of visuals on a page like if they wanted to edit like from 3 to uh maybe five or anything like that so they can always make it it and they can validate Expressions right from here and they can save it don't and you can reset the whole section of default and I'll I'll guess there there will be a Natural Evolution as well where at some point a default measure a default rule that you've edited you could probably reset at the me at the rule level um down the road as well yeah yeah so that that's definitely like we we have a ticket already so I I think that that's one of your big ticket items is the best practices because I mean the the the get integration one makes this a lot more digestible um for you know again because this platform is made for non-technical users it's designed to help you know move towards the low code no code kind of platform that everyone's trying to migrate to uh but for people who you know don't have that technical background clients and customers I think this platform will certainly give a a really good management portal for files that's just helping you um manage version branch and commit and combine uh and optimize all the files so I'm I'm very excited to see how this will continue to grow yeah definitely so this gives the like the goal of this tool is to make everyone as a pro user who doesn't have a background out G or a your devops so I've seen lot of developers who struggle to uh find their path towards that the git or using git or to get so it's U it's very alien for them so this tool helps for them like to easily upload at the same time you are following the guidelines of what needs to be followed so everything is properly committed and you have a commit history and you're going to rise like we're going to add a lot more functionalities down the road but uh it moreover just not Version Control but it also gives you all other collaboration things like uh you can peer review other people's work and you can also analyze quots and best practices too exactly no I mean I think for the cicd type stuff and you just said confirming what was changed by someone else made an edit to a file in in one of their their committed versions I think this will make it a lot easier I do know that we're in the the time of recording for this we're in mid November and this will be coming out early on so what I'll likely do is then for people watching this um there will be links down below to go sign up for the beta so check out any of those links and definitely try this out depending on when you're watching it it just might be in regular release as well but all resources available to to test try Andor subscribe to this will be available down below um but otherwise do you have any Vision on like what's the um like any any kind of like licenses or what what's the general idea behind uh uses for this U especially for the market of like small to medium businesses and then more like Enterprise clients if you have any ideas on that yet um so we're going to give it like five up to five files of P reports uh either report so you can use it for free for life so there won't be any charge and uh after that there will be standard dollar per fee of $5 and we're going to publish the pricing but it's going to be very very reasonable and uh like the the teeny tiny mom and pop shops that just have a couple of reports they can essentially use it but like it seems like most the other tools that I know such as measure Killers like tabular editor the most of the the revenue from this stuff will come from Enterprise clients who are the ones that generally have the the biggest budget to afford this stuff anyways but you you allow it to be scaled up and down for um free for personal use so to speak or companies that are small enough they just have one or two reports and they're in the powerbi tenant and are using Pro licenses but by the time a company is probably using any kind of fabric capacity or premium um then there will be a per developer subscription of some type that's right so it's going to be like per developer subscription and you can even like scale up and scale down you can add Buy number of reports that that you're adding it but it's going to be very reasonable process that uh when it can but the till fire reports it's it's all free so everybody can you it and I'm also curious before we uh wrap up for the day what are the some of the upcoming features so let's actually use that and wrap up and then talk about all the things coming down the pipeline in the next couple of months and quarters for the tool itself there we go sure all right so this is the road map that we have uh so we at the phase one right now which is already ready uh so we are at the beta testing and also releasing the phase one of the features so in Phase One we're releasing the automated Version Control with both GitHub and AO devops it works for both Pro and premium users there is no differentiation so and you can even analyze the reports which I showed you earlier and you can find the dependencies like Lineas and compare between of the reports and the automated best practice evaluation so so this is all we are coming up with in the phase one and uh phase two which is we're planning it on q1 uh which you're going to have the pull request so right from the power offs you can rise a p request right from there and uh you can peer review other people's work you can approve or resite a p request you can even make a comments right from there and you can also find the version history like commit history and many other details and you'll be have a chance to restore the options as well and you will also have a notifications and more too and then Q2 so which we think it covers the end to end scope is the final scope so it's where we want to automate the deployments as well so it'll be a complete cicd with this like with the no code pipeline building so we don't need to write a single line of AML scripts to build a pipelines for AO devops on GitHub so it will support all those pipeline creation and workflow creation for GitHub right from the power Ops itself and uh along with that you can even have like data Source set of rules and triggers like an automated cicd things as well as soon as your pull request is done so you can this TOS will get automatically triggered or you can even set some rules saying that like if the best practices rules High rules any of those fail then don't deploy it otherwise go ahead and like have an automated deployment so you will be able to configure such things in the Final Phase so this is our road map for the tool you got a lot of stuff planned for this for sure so I'm excited to see all these Enterprise features continue to get released for it yeah for sure and uh at some point like we will increase the scope of this from rather than just being the PO reports so you can also have some fabric item also coming into this like data flows and many other okay so the the the the V the vision will continue to expand out for essentially artifact management um outside of just the the project files that's right very very cool I want to yeah I think to finish off I just want to appreciate you for coming on for this um as we wrap up is there anything else that you want to share or pass on uh to the people watching this recording uh no if you guys go ahead and regist for beta and sign up for it and if you have any questions feel free to send us an email at supports. we'll be able to answer so hope this tool helps you uh to adopt the U the Version Control and all so analyze your reports and compare and best practice rules excellent yeah and I'll see as well for everyone tuning in um you'll be back on in early 2024 to do an actual live stream to allow more Community questions I wanted to do our recording to be able to get this out a little bit earlier um especially after seeing some of the information that we had uh when I saw your booth at pass and uh what the capabilities of this are so uh this will be a nice introduction for now but then we'll have much more of an interactive Q&A type live stream um coming up so looking forward to that but otherwise I appreciate you coming on for this and I think this is going to be a really useful tool for the community for sure thank you so much B for hosting me thank you so much for watching please don't forget to like comment or share this video plus if you have any comments for a future video go ahead and add that to the comment section down below now this is your first time to my Channel or you want to see more of these awesome videos please click that subscribe and notification button also feel 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Channel: Havens Consulting

Views: 7,015

Keywords: Power BI, PowerBI, PBI, DAX, Data Modeling, Visualizations, Tips & Tricks, PowerPivot, Power Pivot, Power Platform, Power Query, Power BI for Beginners, Power BI Training, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Best Practices, Power BI Relationships, Power BI Dashboard, Power BI Tutorial, Power BI DAX, Power Query Excel, Power BI Versus Excel, Power Query Tutorial, Power Query Functions, Power Query Parameters, Power Query Editor, Drill Through, Power BI Service, Fabric, Semantic Model

Id: DE4yC9AKTSg

Length: 73min 24sec (4404 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023