Excel BI, Common DAX Patterns

When you registered, you asked to be notified about new content:

• Selecting, Filtering, and Sorting Data in Excel (48-min video, Full Access Members)
• Many-to-many Relationships in DAX (3-min video, all visitors)
• DAX Patterns: Banding, New vs Old, Many-to-many (50-min video, Full Access Members)
• PASS SQLRally Presentations (2 PPT decks, registered members)

Selecting, Filtering, and Sorting Data in Excel

There are many ways to select data in Excel: basic and advanced filtering, range selections, pivot table filtering, date and context filtering, sorting, ranking, grouping, slicing (including timelines), creating user-defined sets, and advanced data navigation. If you want to do things faster and better in Excel, make sure you become proficient with all the different ways of selecting data by watching Selecting, Filtering, and Sorting Data in Excel, our in-depth, 48-minute video tutorial by Carmel Gunn, Data Specialist from Prodata, and follow her many hands-on demos. This is Carmel's third video in her new series on Enterprise Excel BI.

DAX Patterns: Banding, New vs Old, Many-to-many

We have just published two new videos by Alberto Ferrari, world-renowned BI and DAX expert from sqlbi.com. They teach you about three critically important patterns in DAX: banding (eg. prices), new-vs-old computation (eg. sales to new vs returning customers), and the all-important concept of working with many-to-many relationships. Start with the first, short 3-minute video, Many-to-many Relationships in DAX if you have ever wondered about the correct way to use a many-to-many relationship with a bridge table, which is not an obvious task, because of the way in which DAX handles filter context propagation. 

However, to learn it all, follow up with his in-depth, 50-minute DAX Patterns: Banding, New vs Old, Many-to-many video, in which he not only explains those three patterns in detail, but he also talks about the performance of the various approaches, and their relative complexity. If you have just signed-up with us, have a look at our DAX online course, which is pretty extensive with 10 tutorials and over 6 hours of high-quality content, and it is growing all the time, as Alberto, and his esteemed colleague, Marco Russo, add new modules.

PASS SQLRally Amsterdam

I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions at PASS SQLRally in Amsterdam earlier this month. My opening keynote discussed the future of cloud-based analytics, and I have focused on the interesting, new opportunities that these technologies present during the otherwise somewhat messy transition years, from an on-premise reality towards the VM-less, cloud OS of the future. The rest of this, and the best part of the next decade will be spent under the hybrid cloud monicker, so if you are currently thinking how to connect the two worlds, or where to keep the data and if you should even consider moving the compute or presentation logic to either, have a look at the PPTs from my keynote, which I have already uploaded here, while we wait for the videos to be published by the event organisers. By the way, my other presentation covered Data Mining with SQL Server, and I was amazed to see how many people were interested in the subject. Predictive analytics is, at last, becoming very popular.

Promotion: 10% Off

For our newsletter readers we offer a 10% discount, good for all memberships, until the end of November. If you are not a Full Access Member, or if you would like to extend your existing membership, simply use the code:

NEWSLETTER2013NOV

It is even valid for Group Memberships, great for a team of users who need to study DAX or brush up on their Excel BI skills. 

We are very busy preparing 4 more videos for you, and the next newsletter should reach you a little earlier, in mid-December.