if you are lazy like me you're going to
love this video I hate it
documenting all the work that I did to
create my own Excel reports but without
documentation
I couldn't reliably run or update my
reports let alone ask someone else to do
it in this video I will show you how
power bi is essentially self documenting
so you can laze around all you want keep
watching so I'm inherently a very lazy
person and I have come to believe that
that's actually an attribute that's a
good quality because what I've realized
is that I find or I try to find the most
efficient way of doing things because of
my laziness so one of the things where
my laziness manifests itself is
documentation I hate documentation and I
think the whole thing is just pointless
and it takes probably more effort to
document the work that I do and you can
never keep it up to date so I can spend
an hour building the model for hours
trying to document it and then the next
time I make a change I spend 15 more
minutes changing things in my model the
documentation is out of date so I have
tried anything and everything to look
for things that that are self
documenting fortunately in the query
engine is very easy you can also do a
lot of things on the data model side the
measures and all that stuff we'll talk
about that but for now
I love the query engine because for one
it's inherently self documenting right
so if I am to open this file a month
later or if I'm not there and somebody
else is handling in my place they open
it or if I win a lottery and leave my
job and somebody else inherits it all
they have to do is take a look at the
steps and again a lot of times I go back
to a model that I've built a month ago I
have no idea what I did right but it's
self documenting all of those steps are
there
and you can just step through them one
by one see what's happening and again I
like having the formula bar because not
only can I see I can just glance at the
formula and see what's going on so I can
look at the change type and then I can
see yep month is type date budget amount
of currency product keys integer okay
that kind of makes sense on pivot
columns so right so a lot of these I can
just read through the formula I don't
even have to understand the language the
M language itself you can kind of make
sense of it but hey there is more so
this is cool and of course if something
is broken off and you can you know
delete a step or modify it click on the
gear icon it's pretty easy to fix but
you can do more for instance here where
I'm saying filtered rows and I have to
glance at the formula to see what's
going on instead I can rename these
steps let's let's see that in action so
I can go here and I can right click and
say rename and I can just add something
there remove total and subtotal right so
I can be as descriptive as I want to be
or ask you know yeah you can be briefed
up to you and again you can you can do
the same for any step which you think
needs additional explanation and if you
are diligent about it then it makes it
really easy to glance through this and
again we're going to start off start out
with simple queries but believe me here
you're going to end up with stuff which
is pretty sophisticated which is cool
you want to leverage that you want to
leverage that power of power query or
the query engine power bi desktop but
you know renaming things and and such
keeps keeps you honest and makes your
life easier later on another thing you
can do is you can right-click on it and
save properties and it essentially
inserts a comment for this step
and I can come over here and I can say
anything you want right so something
that describes the step what is the need
why am i doing it just any additional
information let's remove total and
subtotal so that we do not double count
later or if it right so you can put in
any description and I'm going to show
you where it shows up so as you hover
over it
notice that the text shows up so I'm
going to give you a quick glimpse off
the code underneath it don't let that
scare you
it's not scary it's no big deal actually
so you've already seen snippets of it in
the formula bar but I'll show you what
the source looks like so again if you go
back to the View tab this is where you
have turned on the formula bar there is
another button here advanced editor
alright advanced editor if you click on
it you see the whole script and you
notice here that you have the filtered
row step filtered rows remove total and
subtotal and this is where our comment
was added so you know no mystery you
know you lift up the hood that's what it
is pretty simple pretty straightforward
but again the whole thing I'm talking
about is self documenting but it does
need some discipline right so if you're
writing complex queries as you would end
up doing make sure as you're writing it
name your steps and I'll show you a
couple of other tricks you can use to
document these and I'll show you one
other thing here which is really really
cool and again this is a simplistic
scenarios but if you end up with a lot
more queries the next thing I want to
show you is going to be a lifesaver and
that is a query dependencies view now if
you remember your part of your desktop
there was this relationship view which
is kind of a graphical view of the
tables this is the graphical view of
your queries so right now it's not going
to look very interesting but maybe I'll
share a screen shot off a real
production model that I have built and
and there it's my life service right now
let's
zoom in a bit so you can see it's
connecting to I'm connecting to the
Access database and I can see that I'm
pulling a whole bunch of tables from
that and then I'm connecting to this and
pulling this budget table again this is
a simple example but in complex examples
this one is really really handy to trace
your way through as to how the model has
been built again the whole emphasis is
on self documentation and that's why I
love this tool all right perfect so
we're done we're done with step one
which is to connect to multiple data
sources and bring all that data back
into power bi desktop so we're ready to
move to the next step hey keep watching
more videos and keep learning power bi
but if you did enjoy this video I would
love to hear from you so leave a comment
like subscribe all the good stuff power
on my friends
you