M – Pardaan.com

Using Power BI Dynamic M Parameters In DAX Queries

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now I’m a big fan of dynamic M parameters in Power BI. They’re easy to use in Power BI Desktop but what if you want to use them in your own DAX queries? Documentation for this is coming soon, but…

17 December 2020

Data & Analysis

An M Function To Help You Explore Power Query Diagnostics Data

Last week’s post showed an M function that took Power Query diagnostics data and formatted in a way that made it suitable for visualisation in a Power BI Decomposition Tree visual. This is great for understanding what’s going on at a high level, but by doing…

20 February 2020

Data & Analysis

Extracting All The M Code From A Power BI Dataset Using The DISCOVER_M_EXPRESSIONS DMV

DMVs (Dynamic Management Views) are, as the Analysis Services documentation states, “queries that return information about model objects, server operations, and server health”. They’re also available in Azure Analysis Service, Power BI and Power Pivot and are useful for a variety of reasons, for example for…

15 May 2019

Data & Analysis

Using Function.ScalarVector() To Optimise Calls To M Functions

One of the most common issues faced when calling web services in M is that the the easiest way of doing so – creating a function that calls the web service, then calling the function once per row in a table using the Invoke Custom Function…

20 November 2018

Data & Analysis

Converting Decimal Numbers To Hexadecimal In Power Query M

This is a very short post! A lot of people have blogged about how to convert numbers between different bases in M (see for example Maxim Zelensky’s very elegant solution for converting from binary to decimal), but today I noticed there was a very easy way…

3 October 2018

Data & Analysis

An In-Depth Look At The Csv.Document M Function

CSV files are one of the most commonly used data sources in Power BI and Power Query/Get&Transform, and yet the documentation for the Csv.Document M function is very limited and in some cases incorrect. In this rather long post I’ll show you as many of the…

14 March 2018