What's New? An Intro to Power Query Editor and Custom Sort Order.
Welcome to “What’s New” for this week on How To Use Power BI!
An Introduction to Power Query:
If you’ve already used Power BI a little bit, you know that if you need to clean or alter how Power BI reads your data source, you get to use Power Query.
We have an Introduction to Power Query this week, and this introduces you to the interface of the tool. Power Query Editor can do a TON of things, so it all the posts about it will be a large part of the site. We’re starting with the interface this week and will be rolling out posts about both easy things to do as well as more complicated transformations you can use if needed!
Custom Sort Order:
Sometimes you need to sort items/categories/etc in a certain order that Power BI can’t understand, such as Likert Scale Agreement responses. Power BI only knows how to sort them by number of responses or alphabetically, but a sort scheme that goes from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree would be ideal.
We’re going to learn one way to set up a Custom Sort. There’s another way that will have it’s own post soon too!
How to search on How To Use Power BI:
As we expand the number of posts on the site to teach you whatever you need to know about Power BI I’ll be building pages and resources to help you find what you’re looking for (such as the new Bar Chart Series, which only has 3 posts now, but will have more).
However, you can also SEARCH the site for something. The search function isn’t the most evident on the platform the site uses, but it’s there on the main page and the archives page.
I wrote a little How-To post about searching the site:
People-Friendly Power BI update:
Some of you are subscribed to my monthly newsletter about making Power BI more user friendly, and a couple weeks ago I rolled out a post about how Power BI has a Jurassic Park problem.
Check it out (even if you aren’t subscribed yet):
Take care everyone,
Joe.