Recently, I worked on a Power BI report for a large customer. I found myself saving versions of the report in the tried and true method: PowerBIReport6_1_2020.PBIX, PowerBIReport6_2_2020.PBIX and so on. You get the idea. This is a variant on the age old trick of naming your files: Version 1, Version 2….VersionFINAL, VersionREALLYFINAL.
In addition to the other inadequacies of this method, I found that I couldn’t remember, specifically, changes I made from version to version. And it turns out that in Power BI, there are a lot of times when you want to try different approaches to a problem. For example, what if you want to see if your report performs faster if you create a column in the Power Query Editor or if you use DAX to provide the value in the Power BI report? Or what if you want to try creating different relationships between tables, to see if one will work more effectively than the other? And on and on it goes.
I had been thinking about GitHub and Git for a while, wondering if it could help me track changes that I am making in a report. So now that I have had a real world experience with wanting to keep track of versions professionally I am setting off to learn Git and GitHub. I will let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, how do you save different versions?
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