Excel: Convert Column of Dates to Text

Posted by Stacy Posted on Tuesday, October 05, 2021 No comments

 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

Posted by Stacy Posted on Sunday, May 16, 2021 No comments
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

Posted by Stacy Posted on Monday, February 01, 2021 No comments

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

Posted by Stacy Posted on Tuesday, January 26, 2021 No comments

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

Posted by Stacy Posted on Monday, January 04, 2021 No comments

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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Neopets Links

Posted by Stacy Posted on Friday, January 01, 2021 No comments

What can I say? It's 2021, my Neopets account is 20 years old, and I'm still playing. I made this page of links to use because their navigation is a little wonky lately. Leaving it public in case it's useful for anyone else. There are more extensive pages like this out there, this is just the subset of items that I'm most interested in.

Daily

Periodically

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