Power BI Insights: Metadata translations; Power BI takeaways; Data refresh automation

Power BI pros share their thoughts on metadata translations, overlooked takeaways about Power BI, and data refresh automation.

Metadata translations

Chris Webb looked at metadata translations, now supported for some time in Power BI Premium. Translations are available for tables and column and measure names. He wrote:

Tabular Editor makes it very easy to edit metadata translations too. However (unlike SSAS Multidimensional) Power BI doesn’t have native support for data translations, that’s to say translating the data inside your tables and not just the names of objects…[Some] techniques [described in other blogs] involving row-level security, for example, can force you to use relationships in a way that will impact performance; the undocumented UserCulture() DAX function isn’t ready and shouldn’t be used in production yet.

In his blog, Webb started off with a Power BI report in English and showed it translated into German. To set up the translation, Webb opened a PBIX file, created a Live connection to the dataset, and went through the renaming process.

Power BI Q&A takeaways

Microsoft MVP Matt Allington recently hosted a video session called "What is Power BI and Why Should I Care?" which he posted on the Excelerator BI blog along with some questions from attendees. One question focused on self service business intelligence. Allington wrote: