When One Agent Tried to DO Everything

-
Image
When One Agent Tried to DO Everything The second article in my Finance Agent series My first Collection Manager Agent worked well - until I kept giving it more jobs. What started as a customer-review assistant grew to hanle automated credit-hold analysis, collection-call preparation, and customer email drafting. Each addition made sense. Together, they created a problem. In my first article, I mentioned the importance of narrower scope. This time, I want to show you what happened when I ignored that lesson. Watch: Why I Split One Agent Into Three What the First Version Was Asked to Do The first Collection Manager Agent started with a simple job. Review a customer. Pull the aging, the credit limit, the open invoices. Tell me what to do next. It did that well. Then I started adding to it. • I wanted it to react automatically when a sales order was placed on credit hold. • I wanted it to prepare me for a collection call. • I wanted it to review disputes and promises to pay. • I wa...
Post a Comment

Column from Examples - Power BI

-
In the April 2017 release of Power BI, Microsoft introduced a great new function.  Have you every been working with your data, and you know exactly what you want a calculated column to look like, but your are not exactly sure of the syntax for the formula?  Maybe you want to concatenate a couple columns, or you want to trim a column or even add some text to a column, well Column by Examples makes this very easy to do.

 You can access this function in the Query Editor on the Add Column tab.

In my sample data there are three columns (birthCountry, birthState and birthCity).  I would like to simply have a new column for Birth Place.  In order to do this, I could add a custom column and write the M formula to define this column.  However I am not sure what the exact syntax should be, so I can simply choose Column From Examples - From All Columns.

This creates a new column in the preview mode.  I can then simply type the result I am looking for in the first row.  "Denver, CO USA" - Power BI interprets that I am trying to concatenate the three columns with a comma between City and State and when I tab off the field it quickly shows me a preview of the remaining rows.  If I simply click OK, the column is added as an additional step in the Query Editor.  

In this example, Power BI created the following formula - 

= Table.AddColumn(#"Merged Columns", "Combined", each Text.Combine({[birthCity], ", ", [birthState], " ", [birthCountry]}), type text)

Column From Examples also works with dates.  In my example there are three columns for the birth date.  (birthYear, birthMonth & birthDay).  Again I can simply select Column From Examples - From All Columns.  In the newly created columns I will type in 12/27/1981 and when I tab off, Power BI will create the BirthDate column for me using the following formula:

 = Table.AddColumn(#"Column From Examples", "Combined (2)", each 
Text.Combine({Text.From([birthMonth]), "/", Text.From([birthDay]), "/", Text.From([birthYear])}), type text)

These are just a couple simple examples, and it is my understanding that Column From Examples does not work for everything, but so far I have had a lot of success using it and it is certainly faster than typing in the formulas myself.

 For more information on this formula take a look at the Power BI documentation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Showing the last 12 months based on a date slicer

-
Image
When working with financial and sales data, clients often ask for charts showing the last 12 months of data.  This is actually very simple using relative date filtering. In addition, they might ask to compare to the same month last year.  With a simple DAX calculation (SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR) it is possible to add this measure. Here is the formula: Same Month Last Year = CALCULATE(Sum(Sales[SalesAmount]),SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR('Date'[Datekey])) For many users this is all they need.  The chart will update each month and they will always be able to see the last 12 months.   However, this chart will not work with date slicers.   If the client adds a date slicer to the page and selects just one month, the chart will be limited to one month. The reason the chart is limited to one month is because the date dimension relates to the sales fact table and it filters the data for the selected month. Howe...
Read more

Adding a new entity to Dual-write in Dynamics 365 Finance

-
Image
As Microsoft continues to grow, expand and improve Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply, one of the most powerful features released has been Dual-write.  Dual-write is an out-of-box infrastructure the provides near-real-time interaction between customer engagement apps and Finance and Supply Chain apps.  In summary, it is a tightly coupled, bidirectional integration between Finance and Supply Chain applications and Dataverse (formally known as Common Data Service).  Dual-write makes integration with Dynamics 365 Sales and other CE application very straight forward.  It also opens up the opportunities to use PowerApps, Power Portal and Power Virtual Agent with Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain apps by connecting through the Dataverse. There is already documentation from Microsoft as well as many blogs already available on setting up Dataverse.   Here are a few links:  Microsoft Documentation  Dynagile Consulting Sandeep Chaudhury ERP Coder Blog Instead...
Read more

A look at Dynamics 365 ERP and ERP Analytics MCP Servers

-
Image
MCP Servers Arrive in Preview for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Recently, Microsoft has introduced MCP servers in preview for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain, marking a significant leap in the ERP ecosystem. This new capability means that organizations using Dynamics 365 can now leverage MCP servers to supercharge their interactions and analytics—all while maintaining the compliance and security standards expected from a modern cloud service. What Is an MCP Server? An MCP server is a specialized, cloud-managed platform designed to handle advanced analytics workloads for enterprise applications. By offloading data processing and analytical computations from the core operational databases, MCP servers enable faster, scalable, and more secure reporting and analysis. These servers are optimized for handling large datasets, real-time queries, and complex analytics scenarios, providing organizations with the agility to adapt to dynamic business needs. You can learn more abo...
Read more