Neal Waterstreet

Shuttering the PASS Healthcare Virtual Group

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Last week PASS Healthcare Virtual Group members received an email notifying them that the group is being shut down due to inactivity. We’ve only had a handful of meetings the last couple of years, and after an ongoing discussion, Damu and I decided it was time to shut it down.

When we started the group in 2011, we thought that having a vertical in healthcare would be a nice addition to the virtual chapters. We got off to a strong start the first couple of years and were able to get some excellent presenters to join us. The presentations covered a broad range of topics that apply to most healthcare data users.

Unfortunately, we were never able to gain enough traction with the PASS community to attract speakers on healthcare. The attendance numbers were never able to come close to matching many of the other chapters, so it was understandable that presenters preferred those.

In addition, the healthcare IT community seemed hesitant to participate. We believe that this is due to how specialized and diverse the different companies are. It appeared that many developers expect that the concerns they have are unique, but that isn’t always the case. Healthcare data professionals share many of the same issues. To alleviate this, we reached out to a wide variety of speakers with some success. We considered having general SQL presentations that also applied to healthcare, but it made more sense to keep the focus on healthcare specific topics.

Thank you to all the group members and presenters for being part of it, and hope you all had a good learning experience.

Atlanta Modern Excel – May Meeting

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Topic: Time Intelligence and Date Tables in Power BI & Excel

Speaker: Marco Russo (MVP, Author, DAX Guru)

Summary: Every Power BI model has dates and the need of calculation over dates to aggregate and compare data, like Year-To-Date, Same-Period-Last-Year, Moving Average, and so on. Quick measures and DAX functions can help, but how do you manage holidays, working days, weeks based fiscal calendars and any non-standard calculation.

This session provides you the best practices to correctly shape a data model and to implement time intelligence calculations using both built-in DAX functions and custom DAX calculation for more complex and non-standard requirements.

RSVP at https://www.meetup.com/Atlanta-Modern-Excel-User-Group/events/250622970/

When: Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Where: Microsoft Technology Center, 8000 Avalon Boulevard, Suite 900, Alpharetta, GA 30009 (https://binged.it/2KQLAPw)

Filtering with MDS Add-in for Excel

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Recently I was asked about filtering data in the MDS Add-in for Excel. The users maintain an entity with a large number of members. New members are entered daily but rarely updated. One way to resolve this is to filter the data in Excel. This simple solution gives users the ability to control the data that they see while giving them the ability to edit if needed.

Here is how to create and remove a filter using the Product sample package that is included in the install.

Adding a Filter
1. Connect to the MDS source.

2. In the “Master Data” tab, click “Filter”.

3. In the “Filter” screen, click “Add”.

4. For “Attribute”, select “Code” from the drop down list. You could use any attribute here. For “Operator” select “is NULL”.

5. Select “Load Data” from the bottom of the screen.  Select “Yes” at the window prompt.

6. The worksheet is now filtered to enter data. The worksheet can now be saved and will filter when the data is refreshed.

Removing a filter
1. To remove the filter, click on the filter to highlight it and select “Remove”. Multiple filters can be deleted by selecting “Remove All”.

2. Select “Load Data” from the bottom of the screen.

2. All of the data is again displayed.