Today I am celebrating my 27th birthday. “not much left before thirty”, my wife playfully reminds me. “We still have 3 more years to go”, I said, thinking about all those things to do before I turn thirty list. All in all the year has been fantastic. We have moved to US for work reasons, I learned how to drive a car (on the roads that is), Got a mac, DSLR and iPOD nano, Started a small but fruitful business in India, Visited to New York and Niagara waterfalls, Overcame my fear of roller coasters, Became passionate about photography and excel, Came to know some of the coolest excel gurus in the world and Read all 7 books in the harry potter series. I hope this one turns out even better.
On to this weeks list of excel links.
14 misconceptions about charts and graphs
This excellent article by Jorge nails all the important charting misconceptions down. Make sure you read and understand this list before heading to make your next chart. My favorite is #2: You Should Master the (Technological) Tools of the Trade. While you need to know the technology enough to create good charts, great charts on the other hand come from you & your imagination.
9 steps to better chart formatting
Jon provides us with 9 simple yet very effective steps to create better charts. I have been thinking about writing on this for a while, but thanks to Jon, I don’t have to worry about it now.
When was the last time hidden cells created such issue? A formatting fubar in one of the excel spreadsheets containing contracts that are acquired by Barclays Capital from Lehman Brothers highlights the perils of hidden cells. We all know that you can hide a row / column in excel by right clicking on the row / column header and selecting hide option. Make sure you tell about the hidden cells when you share your work with others.
Handling CSV files when the content has genuine commas
CSV files are a popular way to share tabular data. You can use them in Excel without thinking twice. But what if you need to create CSV for content that has commas already in it? Daily Dose of Excel provides us with some VBA to handle delimiters in CSV files.
Don’t forget about the A in VBA
This article by Stephane Viot, a Program Manager at MS Excel Team, reminds us about the Automation part of VBA. We all try to solve uncommon problems in Excel by using little VBA wizardry. But often we leave the last steps for manual processing. The article addresses one such problem (extracting unique cells from a range) and tells us how we can automate the whole thing.
Earlier Excel Links:
Excel Links – Mt. Rainier Edition
Excel Links [Oct 6]
Excel Links – Complete Archive
Want to share a link? Use the comments form below or mail me at chandoo.d at gmail.com
2 Responses to “Top 10 Power BI Interview Questions & Answers”
Hello...
In Power BI I have data that includes months by name only (e.g. May, April, December...)
I need to build charts etc. but i need the months to go chronologically... not alphabetically... I cannot seem to find the fix to this.... once again, my data does NOT have an actual date attached to it (like 02/01/2023)....only month names... can i use a helper table wher i id the month names as numbers 1 thru 12? and if so, how do i manage this to work for me ?
Thank you.
~Keith
You need to setup an extra table to map each month name to a running number. A simple 12 row table like
Jan 1
Feb 2
Mar 3
..
Dec 12
Then create a relationship between this month table and your month column
Now, go to "table view" in Power BI and set the sort by column to month number for the month name column on this new table.
Finally, use the new table's month name whenever you need to refer to the month name in the visuals.
They will be chronologically arranged.