Vesa Tikkanen – Page 2 – Vesa Tikkanen

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 14 – Sum against Total sum

Power BI is celebrating its 10th anniversary! To mark this milestone, I invite you to participate in the Power BI Christmas and holiday season Calendar. This special event features 24 unique challenges, each designed for you to solve and enjoy throughout the season.

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Throughout December, we will maintain and announce a leaderboard, showcasing participants’ progress. Correct answers will also be shared. You will have two days to solve each puzzle; for example, the puzzle released on day one will close at the end of day two.

Day 14 Challenge

Today is about execution context in DAX. That will be the agenda in many days in the upcoming week. You have 2 measures [Sales] and [TotalSales]. TotalSales should be showing the total sales over all products. You also have 3rd measure [Sales vs Total Sales] which shows portion of the sales when comparing to Total Sales.

As of now Total Sales does not work.

It shows the same number as Sales. You should modify the Total Sales in a way that it shows (in this filter set) the number 29363677,2207 but of course it should really be total sales so if end user changes context to include only 2006 it should show the total from 2006. So do not just write static number :).

Please describe your solution in a answer form.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day14.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/Zre7D92CWB You have until end of day 15 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

This Holiday season / Christmas challenge is provided by Vesa Tikkanen and is not linked to Microsoft as company. I just want us to have a puzzle every day going towards the 24th of December. This is pure community effort without any business relations behind. As such I try to do this as professional as possible but please remind that this is just for us to have fun. Microsoft finland has promised some swag as a prize but they are not related to winner pickup process neither they get any details of attendance. Information regarding attendance is not being used in any other thing than picking up the winner. So no marketing, no contacting just Power BI puzzle every day.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 13 – Relationships with DAX

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 13 – Challenge

Today your challenge is to create a report where sales can be shown by ProductColor. But unfortunately there is no relationship in the model between Fact and DimProduct.

Which means that on the report it looks like every color is having equal amount of sales which is not true:

Your task is to make numbers look correct. But you are not allowed to modify relationships. You can only change measure Sales which by default looks like:

Sales = SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])

Please describe your solution in a answer form.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day13.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/eCVvVm2xtw You have until end of day 15 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 12 – Custom Calendars

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 12 – Challenge

Today is about custom calendars. So dataset has been modified in a way that we only have months from 1 to 6. You should modify the model in a way that we can still use YTD functions.

Describe how you would do that.

So there is the old EnglishMonthName and MonthNumberOfYear but now also new column MonthNumberOfYear6.

Your task is to make the YTD-functions to work on this custom calendar with 6 months only. But YTD functions should work also for the standard calendar!

Please describe your solution in a answer form.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day12.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/AXtuRi1LjJ You have until end of day 13 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 11 – Making months work

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 11 Challenge

Today is an easy one. Your task is to make sense to monthly reporting.

Sales should be show in chronological order. As of now when Month name is used it shows the values in alphabetical order.

Please describe your solution in a answer form.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day11.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/pyGUfVrivC You have until end of day 13 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 10 – Visuals that change dimensions on the fly

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 10 Challenge

Today we continue on report visualization problems! Business users want to have a single visual that shows sales and taxes either by Product color or by CurrencyName. Having 2 matrix visuals on the screen takes too much space and this has to be completed with single visual.

Answer how you solved this merging. There are probably multiple different solutions but let’s try to achieve this with 1 matrix visual.

Please describe your solution in a answer form.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day10.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/Jy0a4FGVZs You have until end of day 12 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 9 – One Visual, Multiple different measures

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 9 – One Visual, Different measures

Today is about making report canvas more interactive. How would you design report and model if business requirement is to have 1 table/matrix visual. That visual can have only 1 number column but should show 2 different values.

I mean that end-user should be able to click somewhere to switch between sum-of-taxes and sum-of-sales. If end user clicks “Tax” it would show only Taxes and if “Sales” it would show only Sales. As a bonus it could show both sales and taxes if I multiselect both but that is not actual requirement.

Here both of the measures are shown. But as said it should be possible to select somewhere what to show. Either Sales or Taxes or as bonus both.

Please describe your solution in a answer form.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day9.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/yE4ff2EGR9 You have until end of day 11 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 8 – Reusable code in DAX Model

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 8 – Reusable code in the model

Today’s challenge builds on top of the Day 7 challenge. We have a lot of Sales Measures in the model. Currently they are all similar and exact same code. In future Business users want that Sales10 = SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])*10 and Sales11 = SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])*11. So each Sales measure has a multiplication part where it is being multiplied with the number of the measure. Sales45 multiplies with 45, Sales73 multiplies with 73 etc…

Day after tomorrow they could change their mind again and want that to be Sales10=SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])*(10/2) and Sales11=SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])*(11/2).

Abstract that multiplier part so that it can easily be changed whenever needed. So Solution should not be global search and replace where you change hundreds of places the multiplier but a structure which abstracts that so that it is easy to change in one place.

Describe your solution in answer. You have until wednesday 10th to answer! So let’s make it so that we have 3 days time to answer as I can see people answering older questions still today.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day8.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/RGQCm6v4f6 You have until end of day 8 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 7 – batch change within the model

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 7 – Batch change of objects in the model

You could always modify your model with 1 change at the time. What if there are 200 things wrong in your model?

Today’s challenge is to move all Sales-measures from DimCurrency table to FactInternetSales table. Describe how you can do that efficiently?

Someone has created our sales measures to wrong table. Please move them to FactInternetSales.

Model can be found at: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day7.zip

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/Qe4KN1pkes You have until end of day 8 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 6 – Web data and map visuals – Independence Day!

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 6 – Independence day challence

This is special! Today is Finland’s Independence day. It is public holiday in Finland. President is having a reception at his castle etc. Also Finnish defence forces promote persons in reserve. Finland has one of the biggest reserve army’s in Europe. The size of the reserve is currently around 800 000 soldiers and it is about to grow to 1,2 million. Defence forces promote soldiers to new ranks if their task requires that and/or they are suitable for new task. Promotions are public information after they have been announced.

Today’s challenge is to visualize this data into map. I first thought that we would also take the PowerQuery part but that is a bit large task. It is not difficult but as a challenge just takes too much time. So I did a prebuilt dataset for you. You can download it from here: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day6.zip

Your task is to visualize new promotions into map with some meaningful way and celebrate Finland’s independence day with others!

As an example I did personally this:

Publish to web report is here: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiODcyMjA5NTUtNjEzYS00MGIyLWI3MjQtMDI3ZTUyMWNjMzJiIiwidCI6IjhjNmM1OWU2LWZmMDAtNGYxMS1hMjgxLTRhMThjNzFkOWM5OSIsImMiOjh9

You can return the answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/LKyrfu3pf2 You have until end of day 7 to answer. As today is visualization task and there is no file attachment option on the return, just describe the answer.

Happy independence day.

Christmas Challenge 2025 – Day 5 – Roles to protect data

A new challenge will be released every day, starting December 1st and continuing through December 24th. Each day presents a fresh opportunity to test your Power BI skills and creativity.

At the conclusion of the event, a winner will be selected from among the participants. Microsoft Finland has generously offered a prize, with further details to be provided soon.

Day 5 challenge

Power BI Roles to protect data! Today your task is to modify the report so that same report could be used for “Silver color sales people” and “managers”. This means that we need 2 different roles. 1 role that can see all the data and one that can only see sales for the Silver products.

Answer with the role definitions described.

You may download template pbix document from: https://material.qumio.com/christmas2025/day5.zip

You can return your answer at: https://forms.office.com/e/JTKYxpejGG You have until the end of 6th of December to answer!