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Bring Power BI Desktop to the next level with external tools

2 August 2021

Over the past years, Power BI became a widely used BI tool for lot controllers and business analysts. One of the key factors of its popularity is user-friendliness. To improve that, a lot of external tools can be used together with Power BI (Desktop). In this article, we are highlighting the most useful ones.

DAX Studio by SQLBI

DAX Studio can be used to analyze and test DAX queries. Once it is installed, you can open it from the “External Tools” ribbon in Power BI Desktop.

We use DAX Studio primarily to analyze DAX queries generated by the performance analyzer in Power BI and to create calculated tables.

Recently a query editor was added which makes it very easy to create your own DAX queries.

You can find more information on DAX Studio via this link.

Tabular Editor by SQLBI

Since September 2020 it is possible to connect Tabular Editor to Power BI Desktop or a published Power BI Premium data model (Enhanced Dataset Metadata).

With Tabular Editor, you can create calculation groups (explained in a separate article), create and edit measures, and format these measures with DAX formatter.

The advantage of using Tabular Editor is, next to Calculation Groups, that you don’t have to wait for your measures to be evaluated every time you add one. The evaluation time can take up to 10-15 seconds for large models.

You can find more information on Tabular Editor via this link.

ALM Toolkit by SQLBI

ALM Toolkit is a feature that is also available for Power BI since September 2020. This toolkit enables you to compare 2 datasets. The comparison is done for Power Query expressions, relationships, and DAX expressions. This analysis is very useful for version management en tracking changes.

If you are connecting to Power BI Desktop models, you can push updates to measures from one model to the other.

You can find more information on ALM Toolkit via this link.

More information on external tools can be found on the website of SQLBI and Microsoft.

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