Shhh it’s a secret

Power BI allows you to create reports from published data sets! Because Power BI creates a Data set and a Report when you publish to the cloud you can then re-use that original data set (and all it’s measures and joins) as the source data model for another new report. In my experience this is one of the most compelling arguments for transitioning your business to Power BI. I know of places where 100+ spreadsheets have been removed and deeper richer reporting has been enabled using this style of reporting. When it first came out I called it “Secondary Reporting”, Microsoft have now branded this “Connecting to an XMLA endpoint”… I know which one sounds better to me.

The core thing to remember here is that this will lead to you having a single data model with one refresh cycle and one set of troubleshooting steps for when it goes wrong (these things always go wrong after all)

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