Level up Your External Tools Menu in Power BI

[, Music, ], [, Music, ], hey everybody as we get to the end of 2020. I want to take some time and go through some of my favorite innovations in power bi from the past year, and the first one i want to talk about is the external tools menu. This has expanded capabilities of power bi in tremendous ways, as you can see here from my external tools menu, i've got it loaded up with a whole series of applications that provide a lot of expanded functionality and i've gotten some questions about how i structured this and Put this together from screenshots i've posted on the enterprise dna form. So i wanted to walk through that with you today. So if we take a look at my toolbar in detail, there's really five groupings of apps here, the first of which all are grouped together because they they're installed by this business ops app from my carlow at power, bi tips. The second group is from enterprise dna. The red grouping third group is sql bi. Most of you are probably familiar with dax studio, they've, also added analyze and excel this year, which is great capability for breaking down and analyzing complex tax measures by bringing it into excel. The fourth one here is daniel ottker's tabular editor, which is another incredible tool which has finally given us a really powerful development environment, editor for for power, bi and dax um, and i know he's gon na be coming out with a new version. I believe december 11th version three which i'm really looking forward to and then finally, christian wade's alm toolkit and i wanted to go through kind of how to how to install these and kind of use these to to really power up your your power, bi capabilities. So if we look at the first grouping, what mike carlo has done is put together kind of a meta app, this business ops app and if we we take a look at it. What he's got is really a menu and collection catalog of different external tools, applications that people have built and if you check this box, this puts the business ops app on your toolbar and you can use that to then easily install any of these other applications. So i've installed a bunch of these in terms of different shortcuts to other parts of the power bi tips site he's also got the ability to install the sql, bi analyze and excel function, sql bi dax guide and a range of other applications, and so basically what You do, is you just click on the ones you want hit, add external tools and they'll pop right into your toolbar. So the second grouping is the grouping from enterprise dna and the the big dog here is analyst hub, and this is really an incredible app. That'S got tremendous functionality and really a community element to it. That really not only provides you additional capability but leverages expertise from around the world in power bi, and i'm going to be doing a mini series on that following this video. But in order to take full advantage of that, i wanted to get some of these external tools into your toolbar, we'll be showing you kind of how those those work together, but in terms of getting analyst hub and the other enterprise dna tools in your into your Toolbar the best place to do that is through the enterprise dna forum and if you search the form for external tools, you'll come across kind of a whole series of threads on tabular editor analyst hub dax studio, and we go to the analyst hub entry. For that. Stephen mcguire was the one who initiated this, and he - and i have been working together in updating this tool, and basically all you have to do here is just download this json file into the external tools directory on your on your machine. You will need administrative rights in order to do that and i'll put on screen the uh, the directory of where you want to download that to, and that's going to depend in part on how you install power bi. In the version you install. So i install the 64-bit version and i install it manually rather than through the windows store so depending on how you do it that directory may change, but you'll you'll want to search for the external tools directory and download into that that directory. So if you do that, it'll put the analyst hub right on your toolbar and when you click on that it'll, take you directly into the the analyst hub apps. You can go to your documents. You can also go to the community. So, look at all the the entries that people have posted in terms of color themes, examples of power, bi reports, tax measures, planning, templates, kind of an enormous range of information. That'S posted! You can just download directly into your documents and make that part of your library and then use that to copy into reports. It works beautifully with tabular, editor and i'll talk about that in a couple another couple of videos about how to manage scripts through this um. So it's something definitely i think if you haven't taken a look at it you i would absolutely encourage you to do so. There'S a free month trial that you can find i'll post the link to that, but this is one that definitely, i think, belongs on your toolbar. There are some other extensions we've also built out that i want to mention to you, the first of which is practice. Data set and i've done a video on this one already, but steve mcguire has done some recent excellent work in updating this, and what this does is, if you click on this, it creates a three-year practice data model and if we go take a look at this Practice data set and we take a look - it's it's a three-year model up to date, um to today's date, always perpetually updated, and it's just a basic sales model with regions, products, customers channels and the extended date table that melissa de corte has developed. And it's just it's a great way of on-the-fly developing a data set that you can use for testing that you can use for form responses, just an easy way to build out that test data. If we go here, this is the github page that stephen has has developed for this, and so um i'll put this in the um in the in the links on this because you're going to want to track. This he's got all the the information here that you need to to download and install this again. Another highly recommended addition to your your toolbar. We'Ve got a couple more that i want to mention. If we go back to power, bi just a couple of small ones, one of which is the m reference which will take you right to the microsoft m guide and then similarly there's a developer - and i don't know his name because the entire site is in german. Unfortunately, that i i don't read well and so um i apologize for not citing him properly here, but he's developed a nice um power, query m language, formatter similar to the dax formatter or the um, the dax cleanup tool - and it's just you paste your your m Code in here and just hit format, and it nicely formats that make it a lot more readable. So if redirected here go back to the groupings of tools, the last grouping are the sql bi tools and the alm toolkit and tabular editor and one of the easiest ways to get all these is. If we go back to the power bi business ops tool, mike has a useful tools section here and on each of these he's got tabula editor dax studio, alm toolkit, and you can go down on the download page for each of them and it's got the directions On how to download that tool and then install it into your external tools menu, so at the end of that, if you want you'll have a toolbar that looks like this really has a lot of elevated capabilities relative to what you may have on there now. So that's where i'm going to close this one out and then come back in the next video i'm talking about how to use some of these tools along with analyst hub, to provide you some additional capabilities that you may not have seen yet. So thanks again for watching, if you got something out of this, please throw it a like and be sure to subscribe to the enterprise dna tv channel. We'Ve got a lot more content from myself and the other experts coming out soon. So again, thanks for watching see you [ Music ] soon you