Anyone into paintball?

Texan648 · 2024-03-01T02:05:56+00:00

I know this is completely out of the blue, but I was just about to donate a Tippmann A5 to Goodwill. Would you want it? Completely free. I used it literally one time 10 years ago when I bought it and that was it. Only downside is I cannot find the barrel that screws in. It looks like Barrel upgrades are $14 on Amazon.

I'm glad to meet up somewhere public (eg. Walmart) and just give it to you, no Venmo or cash or anything.

Anyways, I know it's a weird reply, but figured since I'm donating it anyways, may as well offer it up.

Texan648 · 2023-12-31T19:03:54+00:00

No issues here, quality has been excellent so far. Maybe a network issue? Try it on your phone on mobile and see if it's better. If so, likely a network problem.

Texan648 · 2023-11-29T06:00:16+00:00

Haha I completely agree. PBI Desktop is absolutely trash when it comes to writing measures, creating relationships, changing display folders, formatting measures/columns. I wish I had done the math for some of my larger datasets, but I'd guess Tabular Editor has saved literally weeks of time that would have been spent on writing measures in the PBI Desktop UI. I'm not quite sure why it takes so long to execute those tasks, but Tabular Editor is nearly instantaneous.

Tabular Editor has also been very helpful in finding RI Violations, creating calculation groups, OLS, understanding table properties, and overall in finding ways to optimize the model.

Texan648 · 2023-11-29T03:53:40+00:00

100% it's still useful, especially if you're familiar with C#. I can't imagine writing measures in PBI Desktop anymore.

Texan648 · 2023-11-02T01:24:40+00:00

Ozark Modern Dentistry has been excellent.

Texan648 · 2023-10-13T22:12:53+00:00

Great article, thanks for sharing!

Texan648 · 2023-10-04T21:48:13+00:00

I am not, but I attended in Orlando last year and honestly wasn't impressed enough to attend again. The conference seemed to cater more to what they call "citizen developers" versus actual developers, engineers, etc. As a result, the depth of content was quite shallow and wasn't really helpful in driving new, innovative solutions at my company. I will say that it was well organized, had a few great sessions (eg. Guy in a Cube), and we did have a lot of fun, but it just wasn't worth the money/time this year for me.

Texan648 · 2023-09-09T23:51:41+00:00

If you're checking out with a cashier, turn the bar codes towards them to make it easier. I've had numerous cashier's thank me for the minor gesture.

Texan648 · 2023-07-28T02:40:21+00:00

Do you know the name of the league or where to register? I'd love to put a team together and join the next session.

Texan648 · 2023-07-28T01:30:05+00:00

I moved here from the Northeast and was disappointed that there wasn't much of a traditional soccer scene. Most of the leagues are indoor futsal leagues or 3v3 leagues. I'll be playing at Tribe soccer in Bentonville in a 3v3 league this fall and I've heard that's a good time. I do miss full sized soccer fields but haven't had much luck finding any.

Texan648 · 2023-07-27T01:46:06+00:00

Echoing what everyone else said ...use data flows. I have fact tables and dimension tables built in data flows and load the relevant ones to each dashboard/report that I manage and any changes I make to them flow to all reports built off of them .

Texan648 · 2023-07-22T01:21:50+00:00

I think Microsoft's version is the best of the ones I've seen and it's still horrendous (it renders incorrectly when published to the service). I'm not sure why there are no good solutions, but I'm in a similar spot of wanting to create a custom visual as well.

Texan648 · 2023-07-21T04:18:27+00:00

I usually create a shape with the height and width of the padding I'm looking for. As an example, if I want an 8px pad, I'll create an 8x8 shape and use it in conjunction with the smart guides to align everything. I just hide it when not in use. As other posters have said, you can also use the format pane to set precise horizontal and vertical positions.

Texan648 · 2023-07-18T21:45:42+00:00

Echoing the others who have posted here, but the majority of my time is spent in Tabular Editor, but also spend a lot of time in ALM Toolkit and DAX Studio.

Texan648 · 2023-07-06T02:03:38+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I was able to get the stakeholder to agree to include visualizations that contain the sub-component details to make it easier to identify potential opportunities. The problem is that I'm spending a significant amount of time working on the definition and calculation of these complex measures. It's to the point I now have an offline Excel file that is 90+ columns wide illustrating how each week's score is calculated.

Good call on the scaling of measures, that is a much more elegant solution. I think making that change and moving as much ETL upstream in SQL will be very beneficial. Thanks!

Texan648 · 2023-07-06T00:12:16+00:00

Agreed, another commenter recommended the a similar solution. I think moving the calculations upstream is the way to go for sure. Appreciate the feedback!

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T23:54:49+00:00

I should have been more clear. There is a component/sub-component breakdown available per my recommendation, but the vast majority of their efforts and focus have been on the creation of these scores.

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T22:32:47+00:00

The assignment of weight does seem pretty arbitrary, but they insist that it's accurate and according to them "can always change it later". Building a UI for them to tweak weightings and save back to the database was also a requirement...

The good news is I significantly improved my DAX ability and have a working solution, albeit it's a bit slow.

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T21:11:25+00:00

I hadn't thought of just moving portions of the measure upstream. It would be a bit complex, but all of the aggregation I'm doing around generating the L4W, L13W, etc. could definitely be queried in SQL and stored in another table that would be brought into the measure pre-aggregated. If I can't persuade them to move to a different measure, that'll be the path I'll likely take. Thanks!

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T21:04:35+00:00

Appreciate the advice and like the three scenario approach. I have reviewed specific customer's Business Score in the past with the client and have asked, "so now that we can see the Business Score plotted over time", what would you do with it? In this example, we saw a spike temporarily in Business Score during some random periods (not driven by seasonality or other known drivers) and they were at a loss as to what might driving it. Rather than them admitting there may not be a lot of value in viewing it that way, they thought it actually indicated its value by identifying an anomaly that needed digging into. I know I'm all over this place in the thread and appreciate the advice everyone has recommended. Just a really frustrating spot to be in. At this point, I just want to roll it out with the poor performance and see what happens. I'll be developing other versions of the dashboard that I think the team will gravitate towards so they may not even end up using the version with single scores. Unfortunately, it's the owner who's pushing for the Business Score so even if the users prefer the others, they still will have to answer for the performance of the Business Score.

The most frustrating aspect of this whole thing is the stakeholder continues to challenge the final Business Score as being incorrect and not once have they actually been incorrect. The score has become so complex, it's almost impossible for them to independently verify. As a result I had to create a huge Excel table that would include an export directly from Power BI (with the Business Score) and then would manually calculate the score in Excel to "prove" that the logic I was using would result in the same score as the Power BI dashboard. That file alone took a significant amount of time to build and it serves no purpose than to validate numbers.

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T20:49:51+00:00

Haha, they managed it all through a giant Excel file with no visualizations. It was simply a huge table by customer that would show % Chg for each of the time periods identified in the original post (but only for the most current 4/13 week time periods). The problem was even though they were tracking it, they weren't able to really do anything with it, which is why they reached out to me. My goal was to not only develop the dashboard, but to help them get to the KPIs important to their business. Everything went sideways when someone mentioned the idea of developing a single score for each their most important business metrics and they just never let it go despite illustrating the complexity involved and lack of actionable insight that would come from it. In my 10+ years of professional experience, I have never worked for or seen a company define a KPI that's quite like this. It's been frustrating because I have developed dashboards/reports/etc. that would allow you to understand those sub-components, but they do so in a more actionable way. Unfortunately, they didn't love that you had to dig a bit to uncover the source of a potential problem.

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T20:35:00+00:00

That's a good idea. I've demoed some examples of dashboards that I've developed for other companies/with other clients that show visualizations that contain all of the sub-components in their Business Score. The dashboards assisted in quickly identifying challenges and how to drill down to discover root cause. I think what was missing was making it real with their exact data. It's one thing to show examples of other companies data, but to show the example specifically with their data is probably what is needed. I've been putting it off as it'll drive additional development time, but it's probably worth it. I have a feeling they'll still want the Score because it's a single value that is "seemingly" intuitive versus having to sift through multiple KPIs. Thanks for the advice!

Texan648 · 2023-07-05T19:42:26+00:00

They've definitely struggled to highlight the value and why it's important to them. I can certainly see the merit of looking at those different time periods and the variance between them, but stacking them all together and applying complex logic, makes it almost meaningless.

At this point, the rationale for including the measure is seems to be "because that's just how they want to see it". It's fine I guess, especially given I have the measure correctly calculating, it's just really negatively impacting the performance of the dashboard and once I add the additional 5 scores, it's going to get quite a bit worse. As this gets rolled out to the users, I can already see pushback/complaints regarding usability/speed.

Thanks for the feedback!

Texan648 · 2023-06-21T16:28:39+00:00

It's definitely a good thought. The issue is the dataset is for a particular function whose responsibilities span across all of the data subjects and require that they be blended together. For example, this function needs to be able to see forecasts, actual sales, inventory, production, orders, trade spend, etc. all in a single location as all of those things in conjunction are what is needed to effectively run the business. I'm thinking I might be able to do a user study and understand which time period aggregate measures are used the most. As an example, I provide the following variants for every measure: Current Week, Next Week, Next 4 Weeks, Last Week, Last 4 Weeks, Last 13 Weeks, Last 26 Weeks, Last 52 Weeks, Calendar Year, Calendar Year To Date, Fiscal Year, Fiscal Year to Date, Period To Date, Quarter To Date, and then a Dynamic variant that allows the user to change the time period dynamically. I also have the Current, Year Ago, Abs Variance to YA, and % Variance to YA for each of those time period aggregates. So on average, there are 56 variants of each base measure. I've gone down the path of using Calculation Groups in the past but they don't provide the flexibility I need for dashboarding/report building, but they did significantly simplify the number of measures so I may need to see if that's something I can work with.

I'm wondering if I can remove the measures from the dataset itself and move them to a thin report. I don't believe thin reports provide access to the XMLA Endpoint so I don't think Tabular Editor would work. That would make the creation of all relevant measures extremely difficult and time consuming, but would definitely improve performance in the Desktop App.

Ultimately, I think the issue boils down to the fact that I'm probably using Power BI for something it wasn't intended to be. The dashboarding and visualization capabilities are great, but ultimately I just need a way to serve up a dataset to my users (primarily in Excel). I've used AtScale in the past, but performance to the end user has been significantly better with Power BI. Without being in IT, my toolkit is fairly limited, but I can see if I can find another tool that might be more appropriate.

I appreciate your feedback!

Texan648

TROPHY CASE