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Power BI Community blog highlights for October

Headshot of article author Jessica Cook

Have you visited the Power BI Community blog lately? Along with rapidly growing forums, event listings, and ways to leave feedback, the Community blog is a platform for you to share ideas with your peers, industry experts, and us here at Microsoft.

We want to hear what’s got you thinking about Power BI and Business Intelligence! Blog posts can be anything from opinion pieces on the latest industry trends, to helpful tips and how-tos for your fellow Power BI users, to even “trip reports” from your local User Group meeting or Microsoft event.

To get started, simply message me, @Jessica, with a rough title for your post and a couple of sentences to describe your topic. Together we’ll make sure you can preview how your post will look once it’s done, and set a publication date.

Posts of the Month

Check out these great posts from October:

Power BI – Dynamic Row Level Security – Tips to get it working!, by Gilbert Quevauvilliers

Are you looking to test and implement Dynamic Row Level security, but it seems like it just does not want to work as you are expecting it to? In this blog post, Gilbert gives you some tips in order to ensure that you can get it up and running.

Theme colours for designing reports in Power BI, by Sam McKay

One thing unfortunately missing currently from Power BI is being able to create theme colours for your reports. The only way to change the colours within a report is to go and change the HEX values manually within the formatting section. You can obviously use the current palette, but quite frequently this isn’t enough. There may be corporate colours to use or you even just may want your report to pop a bit more with some vibrant and coordinated colours.

Dynamically comparing current totals to last year totals, by Sam McKay

One type of analysis Sam likes to use quite often is comparing this year totals to last year totals. I want to also always make it as dynamic as possible. All he should have to do is change the context of my calculation (ie. bring in a new dimension like regions/products etc) and everything should automatically re-calculate.

Different approach to Dynamic Row Level Security, by Jiří Neoral

There were already written few blog posts both about Row Level Security, but Jiří wanted to add one more about this topic. He uses this pattern for several years in SQL Server Analysis Services, and the biggest advantage of this approach is that you don’t have to fight with table relationships, which can be sometimes tricky to make work correctly.

CRM Online issues with oData, and solution with FetchXML by Achin Maheshwari

Are you facing issues while refreshing CRM Online Data in your power BI reports? Has your customer reported report failure or the message “Unable to read data from the transport connection”? Read this post for an alternative approach to the OData connector to access CRM Online Data using FetchXML!