Hello data fighters!!!

Today’s article will be quite short, but very important because it is setting the basis for very important and useful things that we want to show in the future.

Intro

Let’s start with the basics. “.pbix” files are actually files that we can open with Power BI Desktop. They contain the visuals, the filters, the bookmarks, the data model, the M and DAX code and a lot of other things we use when we are creating a Power BI report. But if we treat this file like a zip file, it has contents that can be accessed and used in a multiple of ways.

How to access the contents of a .pbix file?

First thing to do, is create a copy of the .pbix that we want to access. This is because in that way we are safeguarding the integrity of the file as any change could result in breaking it.

After that we change the extension of our replica file from .pbix to .zip, as this will enable us to access its contents.

Then we can directly access the zip file and we can see the contents as below:

As we can see, we get a lot of files here concerning various aspect of a .pbix file such as the DataModel which is the compressed data that are loaded in the data model.

But what we are actually interested about is the Layout file which is located inside Report Folder, we can open this file with a notepad++ and use the json format.

In there, we can find lot of information about:

• Visuals
• Filters
• Report Pages
• Fields used from the tables in each visual, etc.

As probably one can understand this file is very difficult to read. But by extracting information from it, we can use them in order to track changes in the report, see what visuals are broken, etc.

In the next articles we will explore how to do all these things.

Useful Links

• https://data-goblins.com/power-bi/version-control-pt4