Zoom: Improve Call Sound Quality

 By default Zoom calls don't have the greatest sound quality, which isn't much of an issue for most spoken conversations but can be problematic if you're using the call for music or some other purpose that requires high quality audio.

To improve the audio you send over a Zoom call, enable high fidelity music mode through the following steps:

1. Open the Zoom application on your computer.
2. Click on your profile picture.
3. Click 'Settings'.
4. On the left-hand side menu, click 'Audio'.
5. Check the checkbox next to 'Show in-meeting option to "Enable Original Sound" from microphone'.
6. Check the checkbox next to 'High fidelity music mode'.
7. You may also want to check the other checkboxes to 'Disable echo cancellation' and 'Use stereo audio'.
8. When you are in your meeting, click on 'Turn on Original Sound' in the top left-hand corner.

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Excel: Convert Column of Dates to Text

 If you have a column of date values in Excel but need to convert them into text values, there's a surprisingly simple trick to do so - and it's not exactly intuitive.

Select your column, then go to the 'Data' tab and click on 'Text to Columns'. I know, it's weird. We're not actually trying to split up our data into separate columns and I promise we won't.

On Step 1 of 3, choose 'Delimited'. Click 'Next'. 

On Step 2 of 3, deselect all of the 'Delimiters' so that nothing is selected. Click 'Next'.

Now here is the magic step. On Step 3 of 3, under 'Column data format', select 'Text'. Now click 'Finish'.

All of your dates should be actual text now instead of the integers that represent the dates. Yay!

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SSAS: Count Records in Table

The DAX function to count the number of rows in an SSAS table is COUNTROWS. Here's an example of how you could use it if you had a table called 'Products':

=COUNTROWS('Products')

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Power BI: Lock Layered Objects

If you've created a Power BI report with layered objects and don't want background elements to jump to the front when they're selected, thankfully there is an easy solution.

Select the element you want to lock in place, such as a rectangle, and go to the Format tab on the Visualizations pane. Under the 'General' group, turn on the 'Maintain layer order' property. When this setting is enabled, your visualization will stay locked in place instead of moving to the front when it is selected.

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SSRS: Tables in Headers and Footers

I'm going to make this post short and sweet and cut to the chase: no, you cannot insert a tablix table into either the header or footer of an SSRS paginated report.

Sad face.

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SSAS: Objects Randomly Disappearing

I don't have a fix or explanation for this but since I had a hard time finding anyone else with a similar experience online, I figured I should make a post about it. Have you ever tried adding something new to your SSAS model such as a table or relationship, and found it seemingly never appearing? You know for sure that you followed the right steps to create something but you can't find any trace of it in the interface? You're not alone. This happens to me quite frequently and has had me question my sanity until I saw it happen to a colleague too.

If things seem to be randomly disappearing in SSAS, just close and reopen your project in Visual Studio and suddenly you will find them right where you expected them to be.

I'd love a comment from anyone who can explain this or tell me if there's a fix!

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