Recently I was invited for a Power BI consultancy day. This is what I do almost every week, and this is great way to see all the different Power BI challenges in many companies.
The Power BI issue
This client had to load many fact tables to Power BI from their transactional system (there was no DataWareHouse). The fact tables contained data back until 2010. The customer wanted to choose from which year data should be loaded into Power BI, without changing every fact table manually.
The Power BI tool that provides the solution
This is where Parameters in the Query Editor come in! With a parameter you can fill in or choose a value that links to all tables where you link it to. The benefit is that you don’t need to manually adjust all the individual tables.
The solution for this Power BI issue?
I can type how this works but usually a video is much better –> See this short video that I posted in YouTube.
Additional note / best practise advice
Whe you’re done with editing the paramters in Power BI Desktop you upload your model to the Power BI Service. Also here you can adjust you parameter (so for example to set another start date). However, this means that you adjust the settings only in the Power BI Service. When you re-upload your Power BI Desktop datamodel to the Power BI Service, this Parameter setting in the PowerBI service will be overwritten. More in general: Build and backup using PowerBI Desktop, share via Power BI Service.