Microsoft recently announced the public preview of external tools in Power BI. The ability to leverage some of these powerful tools will really expand your available toolset when implementing Power BI reports and dashboards. There is a new external tools ribbon in Power BI Desktop that is the gateway to these tools. All tools are open source tools.
There are three main tools currently available, each tool has to be installed locally on the same machine as Power BI Desktop:
- Tabular Editor
- DAX Studio
- ALM Toolkit
The Tabular editor provides users with a lightweight editor in which they can build and manage tabular models. As an open source tool the source code is in github and managed externally by its author.
One of the most commonly requested support related components we are asked about is related to DAX. DAX Studio is a powerful, comprehensive DAX tool that allows you to create, diagnose, performance tune and analyze DAX.
The ALM Toolkit essentially allows for schema comparisons of Power BI datasets. Using it you can reuse common definitions between datasets, merge metadata files and repos.
If you are interested in learning more about these tools or want to discuss Power BI, please feel free to email or call us.
