New External Tool to Create Practice Datasets

@Alex7891,

Oh man, you’re in for a treat! The External Tools menu is one of the best new features in Power BI. We’ve actually accumulated quite a bit of information in the Software and Tools section of the forum. Here are the “big three” that I think everyone who does serious work in Power BI should have loaded in their external tools. These are full-blown add-ons that actually connect to your Power BI data model and add major functionality. (There’s a fourth one called ALM Toolkit that a lot of people also have loaded, but frankly I don’t really understand what that one does, and the other three have kept me plenty busy learning new functionality).

The Big Dogs

The one current downside to Tabular Editor is that it doesn’t include IntelliSense. However rumor has it that v3,0 will be coming out very soon, and will include IntelliSense along with a bunch of other new features. If that is in fact true, it will be an incredible replacement for the current built-in DAX editor which is woefully insufficient.

The Enterprise DNA Tools. These external tools linkages were developed by @samaguire and @Greg, and basically just call the web versions of Analyst Hub and DAX Cleanup. No additional functionality gained by putting them in the External Tools menu, but very convenient to have them accessible all in one place.

The rest, called through Business Ops Manager. The Power BI Tips guys have done something pretty interesting, which is to develop sort of a meta-manager for external tools utilities. Through this I’ve installed most of the other tools on my External Tools menu toolbar.

I hope that’s helpful, and gives you some cool new toys to play with.

  • Brian

P.S. Just finished recording a YouTube video on the Practice Dataset tool, which should post soon after it comes back from the editor.