Power BI Animated Bar Chart

An animated chart in Power BI is nothing new since you could create an animated bubble chart. But the animation of a bar chart has been something that has been circulated around the Internet in some form or another outside of Microsoft products. You can experience it from Hans Rosling's Gapminder application to the Charticulator tool. This example will use covid-19 data from the New York Times dataset that can be found at github. Though not as entertaining as Trevor Noah's skit on using Excel to Flatten the curve (just search for "Microsoft Excel: Coronavirus Edition"), this hopefully is another edu-taining way to see data.

Changing Time Zones in Power Query

When you get date and time values from another systems, sometimes it is in a time zone that is different from yours. For example you might get a field that has a date/time/timzone in UTC or GMT format, but you need to doanalysiss in Western time. How do you convert the timezone? You could actually do the calculations and offset it by adding or subtracting hours to the UTC value. Switching time zones gets more complicated if you have to deal with daylight saving time. You'd have to find out which zonehour had daylight saving applied and which did not. How you handled the time zones begins by setting or configuring an initial time zone in Power Query for the date/time value.

Unpivot Data with Null or Error Values in Power Query

If your familiar with Pivot Tables, it's basically taking a proper table and summarizing the data for further analysis. However what if you got a pivoted table (aka crosstab or contingency table) already and wanted to do the reverse? In Power Query, there's the option to unpivot (uncrosstab or sort of a transpose) a pivot table view. However it does certain things to the data if it has errors or null values and maybe you don't want Power Query to remove the empty cells or show the error cells. This video will cover both scenarios and the steps to address them.