Use BRAVO for Power BI and SPEED UP your Power BI Development FOR FREE // External Tool for Power BI

in this video I'm going to show you how you can use Bravo to speed up your parbi development we're going to go through how to install it and also some of its several features that I think will really help you out all of that and more so without further Ado let's get started hi my name is fernan and welcome to the solutions abroad YouTube channel where we cover tips tricks and best practices when working with powerbi I upload new videos every week so make sure you hit that subscribe button and the Bell icon to get notified when a new one is out so Bravo for parbi is an open-source external tool developed by sqlbi so if you worked or researched parbi in the past you must have seen some of their articles or YouTube videos because they're quite well known in the space and I've personally used a lot of their material when I'm studying or researching some different topics as I think they cover a lot of the more sort of deeper aspects of powerbi and Dax in general so I really recommend if you haven't seen them to check out some of the work that they do I'll leave a link to their YouTube channel in the description box below so anyway they released Bravo last year on Early Access or beta version and I didn't really get a chance to cover it at the time so now I'm using this opportunity to cover it because I've tested it out and I found a few interesting features that I really really am impressed and probably going to start using from now on so let's go through the installation process so what you'll need to do first of all is you will need to download it from their website bravo. bi it will take you to this page which will just give you a quick overview of some of the things that you can do with this external tool and uh if you want to download it you'll need to go to this download from GitHub link which will take you to a GitHub page with a lot of different download versions so for the version that I'm using at the moment is the selfcontained one so this one installs the Bravo as software in your computer or as well as an ex external so the self-contained version here is the version that I'm using which installs the software into your computer as well as an external tool in the parbi desktop so what that means is that you will need some admin rights for you to be able to download and install this into your local machine so I have done it already so I'm not really going to show you but basically you just click the the link here it will just ask you it will it will just download an installer file you just install it like you normally would any other software and you're pretty much good to go you'll know that it's installed properly once you are able to see Bravo from your list so if I go here for example you will see here Bravo for parbi is here but also if you go to your parbi desktop under external tools you should have Bravo available on the external tools section of the ribbon so as I mentioned before when the installation is finished you have two options to use Bravo you can use it as a standal loan software by itself you just run it and it it will ask you to point to a data set but how I recommend using Bravo is directly in powerb desktop just because it's a lot more convenient to do so so for this demo I'm just going to use a simple data set here the one that we usually use the Northwind data set and what we're going to do is we're going to explore some of the different features that Bravo lets us use and just explain to you how they work and how they might be useful to you so let's start by selecting Bravo here and let's have a look at what it gives us so there are four different sections here on the left hand side that we will explore one by one and so let's start with the analyze model so the analyze model basically gives you a quick analysis of your model the model that you have in your RBI report so it gives you some information like the basic size of your columns the cardinality and their weights and it even has a tree map here on the right hand side to just give you a visual view of you know how big those columns are in context to the whole size of of your data model so knowing which columns or Fields take up space is good for optimization purposes if you are having or experiencing some you know slowness in your parb reports it's generally good practice to find out you know one of the causes could be that one of your columns have very high cardinality or that it has such a high size so so this is a good and quick way to see what those columns are so you will see that there are essentially four columns here that are highlighted in yellow so those are basically columns that are unreferenced in the model itself so from what I understand unreferenced columns are generally you know columns that are not used in sort of any calculations or relationships so typically they would be safe to be removed however just be aware that the non-referenced basically means that it's not being used in a model but that doesn't mean it's not not being used in the report itself so for example here um it's showing that product name and category name are unreferenced so that's why they're highlighted however if you look at the report here we are actually showing and using category name the the column itself in the reports so while it's unreferenced in the model itself we are using it in the report on the report page so just be aware and just be absolutely sure that you are not using the these columns in your reports before you actually remove them so let's move on to the second section of Bravo which is the format Dax now you must have seen this feature already because it was already on on the web but essentially it's a feature that lets you format Dax measures into something more readable so adding indentation or adding line breaks to standardize how you write your measures and uh make it readable for other developers as well so here for example it's giving us a a list of you know all the measures that we have in our model there's only one and it's actually you know it's a very simple measure mind you so it's highlighted here saying that it needs to be formatted so if we select on it it will show you what that measure is so typically it will give you a list of all the other measures here it it shows you what the syntax is of that measure and if you click on the formatted preview here it will give you a preview of what the formatted version looks like now it's only added some spaces in between the the open and close parentheses here but if you imagine if you have longer measures this can kind of save save your time and basically format it to a more standardized form so so let's say we want to use and uh use Bravo to format this so what we'll do is we simply tick The Tick box here and just select format selected here at the bottom so that will basically format our measures based on the recommendations from Bravo now let's move on to my most favorite feat feature from Bravo which is the manage dates now I think this has changed the way that I approach dates or creating calendar tables from now on because as you know I have created a few videos showing you how to create calendar tables and it seems that they have made all of those videos that I've created obsoletes because this I've tested this and it's you know it's a more efficient and and kind of more lean version of of the calendar tables without you having to do a lot of the leg work you kind of just you know pick and choose what wants to have in this calendar table so I assume you know already that you know creating your own Central calendar table is sort of one of the best practices that I recommend to people when they create their you know power be reports it just centralizes all of your time intelligence into one place now Bravo basically is able to create the calendar table for you and allows you to modify a few different things in this template so here we are on the manage dates um it just gives us a model check just to see if the the model is compatible with manage dates and in this case ours is so we're going to leave it there for now at the bottom here it just gives us a sample data of how the calendar table will look like you can change the some of these values here so what kind of templates you want to use we'll leave it to standard for now and then you might want to change the which day is the first day of your week so by default it's on a Monday but you can change that to a Sunday or any day of the week that uh fits your you know what you need and then we have a few other tabs here that we can modify so here for example you can set an interval for your dates so either you can set a specific date range or year range so between X year to Y year or you can use the automatic scan basically looks at all of the columns that you have in your model that has a date type and finds the earliest and latest dates and creates a calendar table automatically based on that so similar to how calendar Auto would work so either you do a full automatic scan or you if you have a column that you want to base this scan on you can choose a column from here as well which is really handy if you just want to base your your calendar range in just one column under the dates I really like this one so you have your Regional format so how your format your dates are formatted the dates what what it's called as well so I'm going to just call this one calendar to and some data dates definitions table so these are just sort of hidden tables that drive some of the bits that will be on your calendar table now I'm just renaming it to calendar 2 because I have created my own calendar table already and I basically don't want to overwrite that one or at least this will have an error if I had the same name so I'm just going to keep it to calendar 2 but normally for your purposes it would just be your calendar table and then here this is really cool actually so here you can turn on holidays which basically lets you define what which holidays or which days are holidays for on your calendar table so it will add these two new columns called working working day and the holiday day for that so it will put one if it's a working day and then nothing if it's a holiday so this is really useful if you're doing some calculations like Network days or some just calculating the days where you only want to calculate the working days between two dates and what's really cool about this is that you can choose which holidays country you want to base it on so mainly I work in the UK so I would usually just choose United Kingdom here because that makes sense for me contextually but if you work in the US you can set that it's already Us by default so that's pretty handy to have in your calendar table and then lastly is the time intelligence so this lets you create sort of the most common time intelligence Dax functions on the measures that you have in your model so you know things like year on year month on month typically you would write these measures yourself however with Bravo you can turn this on and Bravo will create those time intelligence calculations or functions for you so that you kind of just focus on visualizing those those measures in those periods so um you can leave it turned on or turn it off and uh you can choose the target measures that you want to create the time intelligence functions on so either maybe you want to create it on all of your measures or just choose a measure so if you just want a measure just one measure or a few measures that you want to create the time intelligence functions on this is a handy way to kind of just Target those measures so in our case we only really have one measure anyway so we're just going to use that one so we're going to take sales here and that's really it so I think we are pretty much done with the manage dates so we're just going to hit preview changes here and it will basically just show us uh what tables is going to create what their status are are and what sort of columns that they will have both hidden and the active ones so once this is done you just click apply changes and magically Bravo has done the leg work for you so if you hit done and let's close Bravo for a second here you will see what it's done is created this calendar 2 and it's created all of the different columns that you can use so this is the original one that I've created it's a bit more rudimentary so you have only date and month in this original calendar table but look at the one that Bravo has created is it it has so many things that that that it's created for us that we can pretty much use straight away uh some of the more common ones that you would think that I mean it's just very intuitive so if you uh just to show you how it looks or um some of the more intuitive ones so year month for example this is a very typical issue that people have when they create calendar tables is that usually this is kind of ordered alphabetically but Bravo has basically done all of the leg work for you so it's created a hidden column with the right sorting and is create a sorting for us so it's sorting automatically in the chronological order of what it should be so that's it I was really excited about that one so I just wanted to show you the calendar managed dates feature of Bravo so let's look at the last feature that I haven't covered yet which is the export data so this is for you guys who want to export your tables into Excel without having to go through it in parbi well you can do it in parbi too but it's I think export data here it's a lot more convenient because you can do them in bulk and you can also choose you know some export options that normally it wouldn't just be available for you in powerbi so here for example we have a list of all of the tables that we have in our model you can choose the tables that you want to export so let's just export a few things here so let's just choose three tables and you can choose how you want to export it as so either an Excel or a CSV so we leave it as an Excel and um you can also include an export summary which just gives you an additional sheets in the same Excel sheet which just gives you a summary of the job and how it worked if it has any errors or if it fails at any point it will just give you a summary so let's try to export this and let's see what we get so now we're going to save it in my desktop here and here we go so it's exported all of those tables in bulk in the same Excel file so you don't really have to do anything else let's go to my desktop if I can find it and let me just open this file for us so here is the file itself so as you can see these are the three tables that we exported using Bravo and as you can see it's created them in the same file but in separate sheets which is really convenient and it's created an export summary here which just shows you some information like you know what the tables were exported how many rows there were and if those were completed so all three were exported with no problems and that pretty much covers the main tasks that you can do with Bravo for powerbi now let's talk about some of the considerations to bear in mind if you're using the Bravo for powerbi external tool first of all a Bravo doesn't replace the external tools that you typically use to manage your models like the tab editor for example it basically just simplifies some of the tasks that are more tedious to do when you're doing your report developments in parbi so I would think of it as something that works alongside your other external tools the next thing is that Bravo when you use it as an external tool or by itself directly edits your models so as you noticed when we were changing things in the UI itself you apply changes from the Bravo UI it will updates your data model so because it applies changes directly into your data model it's generally good practice to back up your reports or data models before using Bravo it's generally good practice for you to back up your data models when you're using Bravo just in case something fails when Bravo is doing its thing uh you will have your data safe and secure and that's really it for this video I hope you now know how easy it is to install and start using Bravo for powerbi thanks for watching as usual give this video a like if you found the useful give it a dislike if you didn't so to do better for next time ask your questions in the comment section box below so I can help you and you can help others if you like this video we have a patron page where you can support the channel and get exclusive perks like Early Access demo files and credits at the end of these videos thanks again for watching and see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: Solutions Abroad

Views: 4,549

Keywords: solutions abroad, power bi, powerbi, power bi tutorials, power bi for beginners, beginners guide to power bi, data analytics, dax, data modelling, data visualisation, business intelligence, how to power bi, power bi how to, power bi best practices, power bi tips and tricks, power bi standards, power bi patterns, power bi help, power bi tips, power bi 2023, power bi bravo, bravo, bravo for power bi, power bi external tool, power bi calendar, sqlbi, sqlbi bravo, export, data

Id: ZIjFwwcSNEc

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024