Tag Archives: summary
Power BI Service and Mobile October and November 2019 feature summary
The past couple of months have been nothing short of fantastic for the Power BI team. Even with the holiday season fast approaching, our engineers continued to work hard and deliver some of most anticipated features across Power BI service and mobile. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap all the announcements we made in the months of October and November:
Refresh your Power BI dataset using Power Automate
We released a new Refresh a dataset action to the Power BI connector for Power Automate. You can now trigger refreshes for your datasets in Power BI based on hundreds of Automate triggers. Whether your trigger is based on changes to items in your SharePoint list or updates to an Excel file in OneDrive or SharePoint Online or a complex day and time schedule, there are dozens of use cases where you can leverage this action. Check out the announcement blog to learn more.
On-premises data gateway management via PowerShell (Preview)
We rolled a public preview of PowerShell cmdlets that help you automate and manage tasks for Power BI data sources and On-premises gateways. These cmdlets are available in the PowerShell Gallery and can be installed in an elevated PowerShell session. Learn more
Contact lists for reports and dashboards
To help end users ask questions, raise issues with the data they see, or seek confirmation, we added a new feature that allows authors to configure the list of contacts, which can include multiple users and groups, for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service. When used with the New Look for the Power BI service, end users can quickly find and contact someone to make timely data driven decisions. Learn more
Power BI lineage view (Preview)
Understanding the flow of data from the data source to its destination is critical for building reports. To help you visualize this, we introduced a public preview of lineage view. The view encompasses the flow of all Power BI workspace artifacts including dataflows, datasets, reports, and dashboards and their connections to the external data sources. Check our announcement blog to learn more.
General availability of Automated Machine Learning
We announced that Automated Machine Learning (Auto ML) in Power BI is generally available in all public cloud regions. With this feature, business analysts without a strong background in machine learning can build ML models to solve business problems that once required data scientists. Most of the data science behind the creation of the ML models is automated by Power BI, while giving visibility into the process used to create your ML model to provide you with full insight. To learn more, check out the step-by-step tutorial that shows how to build your machine learning model using Auto ML or refer to the documentation.
Large models in Power BI Premium (Preview)
We supercharged Power BI Premium by releasing a public preview of large models. As you are already aware, Power BI datasets can store data in a highly compressed, in-memory cache for blazing fast query performance. This enables fast user interactivity over large datasets. However, these dataset caches were limited to 10 GB after compression. The new large models remove this limitation, so dataset cache sizes are limited only by the Power BI Premium capacity size. Check out https://aka.ms/LargeModels for further information such as availability by region, and how to set up your Power BI Premium capacity for large models.
Data protection capabilities (Preview)
As enterprises grow their Power BI deployments, reducing the risk for data leakage becomes critical. To help organizations govern their sensitive business data, we partnered with the Microsoft Information Protection and Cloud App Security team to release a public preview of data protection capabilities for Power BI. With this feature, you can now classify and label sensitive Power BI data using the familiar Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels used in Office, enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF, and much more. These are also applicable to Power BI mobile apps. Read our detailed documentation to learn more.
Embedding paginated reports in applications (Preview)
We also announced the public preview of embedding paginated reports to allow ISVs and developers to embed pixel-perfect reports in their own applications using Power BI APIs. Check out the tutorial or read the documentation to learn more.
Upgrade classic workspaces to the new workspaces experience
We announced that you can now opt-in to upgrading classic workspaces to the new workspaces experience in Power BI. The Power BI new workspace experience has been General Available since April 2019. It offers improved security management, more flexible workspace roles, and new capabilities like a contact list to help you support your teams. Using the new workspace experience also enables several major features like shared and certified datasets and large models, to name a few. Learn more
November update for On-premises data gateway
We also updated the Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of November. Version 3000.14.39 includes a new way to change the gateway’s recovery password and an updated engine to match the Power BI Desktop November update. Learn more about the updates in our release blog or check it out by installing the new gateway.
Updates to Power BI mobile apps
Lastly, we updated the Power BI mobile apps with the following features:
- Android support for remote configuration of Report Server access settings – IT admins can now use their organization’s MDM tool to remotely configure those settings on both iOS and Android devices. See Configure Power BI mobile app access to Report Server remotely for details.
- Cross-report drill through – You can now tap on a data point to drill through to access other reports and report pages. When you drill through to a target page, the content in that page is filtered based on the drill through settings.
Roadmap updates
We use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months. These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently:
Power BI Desktop November 2019 Feature Summary
The November update has major updates in several areas of Power BI Desktop. There’s a new, modern ribbon that aligns Power BI Desktop with Office and adds more functionality. We’re also adding a new visual, the decomposition tree, which is one of the most requested ideas on ideas.powerbi.com. AI functions integrated into Power Query allows you to take your data transformations to the next level, and of course we have incremental improvements across the entire product.
Here’s the complete list of November updates:
Modern ribbon (preview)
Continuing our journey to modernize the editing experience for all our users, this month we are previewing a new ribbon. If this ribbon looks familiar to you, it is because we are now using the same ribbon that you see when using Office 365.
This new ribbon has several benefits compared to the previous ribbon:
- Improved look and feel and organization
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A themes gallery, where you can more easily see what colors will be applied
-
Dynamic ribbon content based on your view, so you no longer have many disabled buttons in the data and modeling view
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A single line ribbon when the ribbon is collapsed, which allows you to save space while working
- The ribbon won’t occasionally freeze, for those who had that issue with the previous ribbon
There are also a lot of benefits to come with this update as well. The new ribbon allows us to, in future updates:
Hopefully, it’s obvious from the list of future additions we want to do, but this is just the first of more updates that will come for the ribbon. Make sure to let us know what else you’d like to see added or changed in our ribbon!
We also have a dedicated blog post just on our ribbon updates, so make sure to check that out.
Watch the following video to learn more about the new ribbon:
Decomposition tree visual (preview)
We are very excited to announce a preview of one of the most and longest requested features for Power BI, a decomposition tree visual. A decomposition tree can use to perform root-cause analysis by viewing how individual categories in a group contribute to the whole. The visual lets you decompose, or break down, a group to see its individual categories and how they can be ranked according to a selected measure, such as by sales amount.
Once you turn on the visual through the preview tab of the Options dialog, you’ll see the new visual option in the visualization pane.
Once you add the visual to your page, you’ll see two buckets in the field well. The first, Analyze, is where you’ll put the numeric field you want to break down, in my case Sales Amount. The second bucket, Explain by, is where you’ll put all the possible fields you’d want to break your numeric field down by.
One of the interesting difference in the decomposition tree, compared to other visuals, is that you get to pick dynamically which of the fields in the explain by field well you want to look at and in what order. This means that the initial view you’ll have is just the numeric value with a small “+” next to it.
Clicking on this plus will allow you to either pick a specific field from the provided options to break down by or let the visual decide which field to use, depending on if you’re looking for the highest or lowest value.
As you expand on different fields, you’ll see a path forming in your tree. If the tree expands beyond the dimensions of the visual, you can pan and zoom with your mouse to get a better view.
As you go further down the tree, you can look at the headers and the darkened lines to get a reminder of what part of the tree you’re exploring.
If you pick either high or low values to expand on, you’ll also see an lightbulb next to the header to remind you that Power BI is picking the field for you dynamically and it’ll update and change as your data refreshes. The connecting line is also dotted, as another visual cue.
Like our other built-in visuals, you get all the good features you’d expect, such as support for:
- Cross-highlighting
- Picking up theme colors
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Formatting options
- Bookmarking
When you save your report, the visual will remember what configuration it was in and reopen to that format, but your consumers will be able to explore and configure the visual as much as they want to find new insights.
If there are specific levels you don’t want your users to change, you can lock them using the lock icon near the header (you won’t have this option for AI driven levels).
Make sure to try out this visual while it is in preview and let us know what else you’d like to see added!
Watch the following video to learn more about the decomposition tree:
Conditionally format button formatting
This month’s conditional formatting update for formatting are all button related. You can now dynamically set formatting for the following properties:
- Button text font color
- Button text
- Icon line color
- Outline color
- Fill Color
- Button tooltip (under the action card)
As a remainder, you can tell a property can be conditionally format-able by looking for the three dots on hover.
And once a property has been dynamically set, it will be replaced with an fx button.
Watch the following video to learn more about dynamic button formatting:
ArcGIS Maps for Power BI update
The ArcGIS Maps for Power BI visual has several updates this month. The visual now has support for connecting to ArcGIS Enterprise servers using built-in authentication. You can also now geocode up to 3500 points as a free user and 10,000 as a ArcGIS subscriber. Lastly, if you’re an ArcGIS subscriber you now get full Esri Technical Support for ArcGIS Maps for Power BI.
New xViz visuals
There are two new visuals in the xViz suite this month! As a quick reminder, the xViz suite is an all in one visual suite. There are currently 9 visuals in the package, all with free and pro features. If you decide to license the pro features, you get access to the advanced capabilities for all the visuals for one price.
Advanced Gauge
The Advanced Gauge visual allows you to easily compare an actual value, such as your key business indicators, against a target value. There are a lot of customization and configuration options available for this visual. Your gauge can either be a full or semi circle, with the added ability of showing two different metrics in the same gauge. Some other configurations include:
- Conditional formatting options for the gauge fill color
- Set a fill and/or needle indicator for the current value
- Control the colors for the target indicator
- Set a min/max value
- Axis and number formatting, including tick control
Watch the following video to learn more about the advanced gauge:
Hierarchical Filter
The Hierarchical Filter visual is a slicer visual that supports hierarchies, advanced formatting, search, and even displacing a metric of choice. Each node of the slicer allows you to expand and collapse it for optimal navigation and allows you to easily single and multi-select categories to filter by.
Some of the advanced formatting options for this visual include:
- Conditional formatting support for both the categories of the slice and the optional metric
- Search support with two different search types
- Setting the default expansion level
- Full text and background formatting, including unique formatting for hover and selected value
- Advanced number formatting
Try at this visual from AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the hierarchical filter:
ZoomCharts Drill-Down Waterfall Visual
The ZoomCharts Drill Down Waterfall visual is a new addition to the family of ZoomCharts custom visuals and
is equipped
with all ZoomCharts signature features – interactive drill down, smooth animations and rich customization options. The visuals are optimized to work on both desktop and mobile devices providing intuitive user experience.
The ZoomCharts Drill Down Waterfall visual introduces more freedom and flexibility when it comes to visualizing increases and decreases, and totals. Some of the key features of this visual include:
- Subtotal display and calculation – add and display subtotals straight from the dataset or calculate them automatically;
- Column sequence – set the display order for columns (change values)
- Display of the total – turn on or off the total column; have it calculated dynamically or make it data driven
- Advanced formatting options – customize increases, decreases and totals separately (colors, outlines, column widths, connectors, value labels and more)
- Touch-driven slicer – filter the report page by using the visual itself (no need for external slicers)
- Touch-driven drill down – touch or click any column to drill down into it; long-press it to select the column
Some common use cases for the Drill Down Waterfall include total profit and loss decomposition in accounting and finance, monitoring stock movement in inventory management, understanding campaign contributions to lead volume in sales and marketing, and viewing changes in staff numbers in human resources.
Watch the following video to learn more about ZoomCharts Drill-Down Waterfall visual:
Financial Reporting Matrix by Profitbase
The Financial Reporting Matrix by Profitbase visual is geared towards easily building financial reports. The visual is a matrix with many of the formatting options you’d expect in a financial report. Some of the features of this visual include:
- Sub and grand total controls
- Line formatting
- Sticky column and row headers
- Conditional formatting
Watch the following video to learn more about the financial reporting matrix by Profitbase:
Distribution
The Distribution visual by Inservit allows you to see an indicator for each categories of the field you put into the visual, much like the legend of a visual. You can use these indicators as a way to filter the report. The indicators have a lot of formatting options, including:
- Ability to show or hide the category and data labels
- Change the indicator border and share
- Swap the orientation between horizontal and vertical
- Conditional formatting for the indicators, and border
Find this visual on AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the distributions visual:
Tree
The Tree visual by CK Corporation allows you to visual your hierarchical data in an easy to use tree structure. All you need to do is give the visual a parent id and child id, and it will automatically figure out the tree structure. If there are multiple levels to the tree, you can expand nodes by hovering over them and clicking the plus icon. You can also use various formatting features, such as:
- Switching between horizontal and vertical orientation
- Set the default expansion level
- Customize the labels
- Change the node and line styles
- Set conditional formatting for the nodes
Watch the following video to learn more about the tree visual:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator connector (beta)
LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you access the power of LinkedIn’s 630M+ member network to help sales professionals find and build relationships with prospects and customers. If you’re using this feature, you can now pull your data into Power BI using our new connector. You need to have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Enterprise plan, and be either an Admin or Reporting User on the Sales Navigator Contract to connect to this data.
Edit SAP variables experience now generally available
Back in August, we released a preview of our Edit SAP variables experience, to allow report consumers to edit SAP variables in the Power BI service with their DirectQuery reports. This month, we’re excited to announce that this experience is now generally available and also supported in Shared workspaces. Read our documentation to see how to set this experience up.
Vena connector
Vena’s finance process management software accelerates and improves budgeting, forecasting, planning, financial close management and consolidations, and more, by connecting people and enterprise data, resulting in better planning, better decisions making, and an elevated role for finance. The Vena Power BI connector easily connects Vena data to Power BI. Enable faster analysis, greater insights, and better decisions by enabling access to self-service enterprise data analytics.
SiteImprove connector
SiteImprove offers a comprehensive cloud-based Digital Presence Optimization (DPO) software. Create higher quality content, drive better traffic, measure digital performance, and work towards regulatory compliance – all from one place. The connector gives access to SiteImprove’s digital insights data to monitor your websites performance for accessibility, SEO, analytics, quality assurance, and much more to help you and your team to create higher quality content, drive better traffic, measure digital performance, and work towards regulatory compliance. Find out more at https://siteimprove.com/en/core-platform/integrations/connectors/power-bi/.
Product Insights connector
Product Insights is a new Dynamics 365 product which allows you to collect signals from your products and services, and gain valuable insight into customer usage, in real-time. The connector accesses aggregated signal data (metrics) from Product Insights. Find out more at https://pi.dynamics.com/.
Web By Example connector – support for extracting links
We’re glad to announce a significant enhancement to the Web By Example connector, allowing you to extract links (src/href attributes) as part of the Web By Example experience.
In the example below, we’re leveraging this new capability in order to extract information about Power Query Books (including Author, Title and URL) from the Power Query resources page: https://powerquery.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/
Watch the following video to learn more about the updates to the Web by Example connector:
AI functions in Power Query (Preview)
After introducing AI functions in the Power BI service earlier this year, we’re now releasing these features in Desktop as well. You can extract insights from your text and image data with models for text analytics and vision, and access all your Azure Machine Learning models directly in Power BI Desktop. You’ll notice new buttons show up in the Power Query editor once you have the ‘AI functions’ option enabled in the preview settings.
Text analytics can help you detect the language of a text column or field, score its sentiment, or extract key phrases. Detect topics in images with the image tagging function, or run new data through your own Azure ML models. The results of each function are added as a new column to the query.
For functions that return multiple values – currently this is true for Key Phrase Extraction and Image Tagging – the results are returned both as a comma separated column and as new rows for each separate key phrase or tag.
Text analytics and vision models are Premium only features. In the setup window you can choose which capacity to use while editing the report. When you publish the report to a Premium workspace, we will use the capacity related to that workspace for any data refresh. Text analytics and vision functions can’t be refreshed in non-Premium workspaces.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations template app allows sales operations personnel to see aggregated information about how effectively a sales team uses Sales Navigator. It enables sales operations personnel to identify and analyze things like:
- Who is using LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- How many LinkedIn profiles match search criteria
- The Social Selling Index across all users
To use this template app, you must:
- Have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Enterprise plan
- Be an Admin or a Reporting User on the Sales Navigator Contract (Note: A reporting license on the Sales Navigator contract does not take up a seat on that contract)
- Be a Power BI user
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Sales Operations template app is available for download from AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator template app:
That’s all for this month! We hope that you enjoy these updates for the month. Please continue sending us your feedback and don’t forget to vote for other features that you’d like to see in the Power BI Desktop. For any preview features, you can always give us your feedback in our active community. You can also download the .pbix file I used, and if you’re looking for a similar design for your reports, I was using the Microsoft layout from PowerBI.Tips.
Power BI Service and Mobile September 2019 feature summary
It’s time again to recap the features and announcements in the Power BI service and mobile for the month of September. Here’s a quick rundown in case you missed it:
New Look for Power BI mobile (Preview)
We announced the public preview of the “new look” for Power BI Mobile. As part of the new look, we introduced new experiences including a home page that provides quick access to your commonly used content, custom branding for your organization, and new navigation bars that give you an easy way of navigating through the app. If you haven’t opt-ed in and tried it already, give it a shot and let us know your feedback. Check out the announcement blog to learn more.
September update for On-premises data gateway
We also updated the Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of September. Version 3000.9.194 includes an updated version of the Mashup Engine, which will match the one released as part of the Power BI Desktop September update. Learn more about the updates in our release blog or check it out by installing the new gateway.
Template apps update (Preview)
We rolled out a highly requested update to Template apps where after downloading and connecting a template app from AppSource, all users can update the app while preserving its connection configuration. In addition, we also further enhanced the sample data experience for template apps, so end users can try out the apps before connecting to their own data. That’s right! Every template app can be installed from AppSource and viewed with sample data. When opening a report or dashboard you’ll see a new banner, reminding you that you’re experiencing the app with sample data. Learn more
Roadmap updates
We use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months. These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently:
Power BI Desktop October 2019 Feature Summary
This month’s update is filled with major updates across the whole product. In the data preparation area, we’ve introduced query diagnostics, which allow you to see what queries are being run behind the scenes. On the reporting side, we are taking a huge step forward in terms of real-time reporting, with our new automatic page refresh feature. This feature lets you trigger refreshes for your DirectQuery-based report at regular intervals. Q&A has also been completely revamped this month, with a new Q&A visual, tooling, and improved user experiences.
Here’s the complete list of October updates:
For a summary of the major updates, you can watch the following video:
When monitoring critical events with Power BI, it’s important that the data is reflected in Power BI as soon as the data source gets updated. For example, in the manufacturing industry, it’s critical to know when a machine is malfunctioning. To enable this, we are releasing automatic page refresh, which allows you to set the refresh interval of visuals in your report when using a DirectQuery source. For very fast updating sources, this near real-time experience will allow your consumers to monitor time-critical reports and ensure that they are always viewing the latest.
To use automatic page refresh, make sure you have it turned on in the preview Options dialog.
After that, you’ll see a Page refresh card in the formatting pane for the page when connected to a DirectQuery source. In that card, you’ll set the duration of your refresh.
In Desktop, you can set up this refresh as frequent as once every second, assuming your DQ source can handle that. In the service, the minimum refresh time is 30 minutes for a regular workspace, so once you publish the report, the duration will be overwritten if it’s less than 30 min. If your workspace is part of a premium capacity, your duration can go as low as the minimum set by the capacity admin and will only work if the admin has enabled automatic page refresh in the capacity.
To learn more about the automatic page refresh preview you can read our documentation
Watch the following video to learn more about automatic page refresh:
The new Q&A Visual
This month we are bringing NLG (natural language generation) even more to the forefront of reporting in Power BI with a new Q&A visual. This is a full visual experience that allows you to give the Q&A experience to your end-users. While similar to using a button to trigger Q&A, this visual can improve discoverability for your report consumers, as the experience isn’t hidden behind an extra button click. The new Q&A Visual can interact, cross filter, support bookmarks and be themed just like any other visual. To add the visual to the report, just click on the Q&A icon from the visualization pane.
This will add the Q&A visual to the report page with an input box for you to type your questions and a few suggestions to get started with. Clicking any of the suggestions will automatically populate the input box with that question and show you the result.
Otherwise, if you have your own question to ask, type it out and see Q&A automatically give you the result.
As a report author, you also have the ability to use this visual as an authoring tool and convert the Q&A visual into the specific visual you’re seeing if you’d like to stick with that one visual. Just click the icon next to the input box.
Near the top of the visual result, you’ll also see an info icon that has the restatement as a tooltip. If you ever want to confirm what the Q&A result is showing you, you can hover over this icon to see the restatement.
The state the Q&A visual is in when you save your report is what your report consumers will see as well. So if you have the report with a Q&A in the box, that will be the default view for your end users. You can also use bookmarks to save different Q&A questions for your end users. The Q&A visual will also automatically pick up your applied theme and cross-highlight automatically works between visuals on the report page and the Q&A visual.
You also have complete formatting control over the question input box through the question field card in the formatting pane.
The suggestions’ appearance can also be formatted.
If you’re using the Ask a Question button in the ribbon or double-click to trigger the Q&A experience, those entry points will now create Q&A visuals.
Improved user experience for Q&A
We’ve also updated the user experience for the Q&A question input box. You’ll see blue underlines on terms that we understand from your data model. Red underlines are used for terms that are ambiguous or we don’t understand at all. There is also a new dropdown experience when selecting a specific auto-suggestion as you type that is similar to what you get in web search engines.
We’ve also done a lot of work to improve the visuals that are generated from Q&A. Q&A should be even better at suggesting the best visual following visualization best practices for the specific questions you ask.
Natural Language improvements for Q&A
Integration with Office/Bing thesaurus
We’ve done a lot of work to also improve core engine inside Q&A by allowing it to automatically understand common synonyms by leveraging Office/Bing data to understand terms which are not mentioned in your data model.
Support for measure tables and better handling of table names and ambiguity
If you have used Q&A before, you would know that Q&A does not work very well when dealing with disconnected tables. This update brings the biggest improvement to Q&A working out of the box automatically by providing automatic handling of disconnected/measure tables and figuring out which measures are related with which dimensions. You no longer need to make a specific data model just for Q&A which we hope will save you countless hours and pain.
Row label and synonyms support inside Modelling pane
This update also brings support for Row labels (formerly known as default labels which were available inside Excel) which allows you to define the row identifier for a table. To define the row label, you can go to the modeling tab and click a table name to see the option. Also, if you wish to define synonyms which are to be used by Q&A you can use the modelling pane to quickly define all the synonyms for all columns inside your data mode.
This month we’re also introducing tooling you can use to see how people are using the Q&A visual and improve the results they’re getting. You can reach this tooling by click on the gear icon.
Review questions
The first section of the tooling allows you to see the questions consumers are asking in your reports. You start out by picking which dataset is used in this report.
From there, you’ll see a list of questions that have been asked in the Power BI service from that data. You can filter the list to see either all questions or just the ones where the consumer has asked for you to fix the result to give a better answer. Any questions where Q&A didn’t understand the terms will have a pencil next to them, which will take you to the next section, Teach Q&A, to fix it.
Teach Q&A
The second section in the tooling allows you to teach Q&A how to respond to questions that are ambiguous. You can start by typing in a question such as “Show my best manufacturers” and clicking Submit.
Then the terms that Q&A didn’t understand, in this case “best”, are identified, and you’re given an experience to teach Q&A what those terms mean.
You can then type in your own custom definition, such as good manufacturers have a high sales amount, see the potential result on the right, and save the definition once you are happy.
You can do this for as many terms and questions as needed.
Manage terms
The last section allows you to manage the terms you’ve added to Q&A through the Teach Q&A section. You’ll see each term, its definition, when it was created, and if you no longer want the term an option to delete it.
Support for SSAS and Azure AS including RLS
Finally, we now support SQL Server Analysis Services and Azure Analysis services with Q&A allowing you to connect to your data without having to import the data first inside Power BI. In order to use this feature, you must first enable the preview feature switch in options and settings -> options -> preview features.
There are a few limitations that we’ll be addressing over the coming months. You can find the details in the documentation.
If you haven’t already, start using Q&A and provide a truly self-serve experience for your end-users. As always, we would love to hear from your feedback and what you think about the new Q&A experience.
Watch the following video to learn more about the new Q&A visual and tooling:
PowerApps visual is now included by default
Last month, we announced that the PowerApps visual was generally available and certified, and to continue along that vein, this month we’re announcing the visual is now included by default. Instead of needing to add the visual from the marketplace, you’ll find it automatically included with the list of other built-in visuals within the visualization pane. This visual is a key integration with the rest of the Power Platform and enables key scenarios such as writeback and taking immediate data-driven actions on your insights.
New xViz visuals
There are three new visuals as part of the xViz suite. The xViz suite is a set of custom visuals that aim to meet your end-to-end BI needs. You can use all the visuals within the suite for free with their branding and some data row restrictions or you can pay one price to unlock all the visuals. You can learn more about pricing here.
Hierarchical Variance Table
The Hierarchical variance table lets you compare to measures within a hierarchical table layout and see the variance, % variance, and how that contributes to the whole. If you include a date field, you can also see a sparkline within the table.
You can use the number formatting card to apply custom formatting to the measures.
The same card also has a section called semantic formatting that lets you change the color and format based on if the value is negative or positive.
Right-clicking on the row headers will allow you to do things like rearrange the order of the hierarchy, hide or show totals, change the sort order, expand to a specific level of the hierarchy, or show and hide different column headers.
Other formatting options include:
- Text and background colors for alternating rows
- Renaming headers
- Hiding empty rows
- Adding a search bar (only for the Power BI service)
Find this visual on AppSource.
Linear Gauge
The second visual this month is the Linear Gauge, which allows you to compare a value to a target goal.
In the conditional formatting card of the formatting pane, you can set the band thresholds and colors.
You can also customize the marker shape, size and offset from the bottom for both the actual and target in the gauge options card.
Other formatting options include:
- Setting minimum and maximum values
- Axis formatting, including text size, colors, and label density
- Data label formatting
Tag Cloud
The last visual for this month is the tag cloud. This word cloud visual allows you to get instant insights of the more prevalent terms in your data, such as product descriptions, tweets, and feedback comments.
Some key features and options include:
- Split phrases into individual words
- Remove special characters
- Exclude words
- Format the word size, color, angles, and number of orientations
You can also control the color and size of the words based on different metrics.
You can find this visual on AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about these new visuals:
Sagra Emigo connector generally available
Emigo supports sales organizations and field teams management. It automates all daily activities of field professionals. Inventory data, orders, answers from surveys or all sorts of other digital forms are available for managers and other teams within organization, through the Biqsens Power BI app as well as through Emigo BI Connector for Power BI Desktop.
Azure Cost Management update
Azure Cost Management enhances exploration and analysis of your Azure cost data. With it, you can make powerful and flexible reports to understand your consumption patterns.
What’s new:
- Supports OAuth 2.0 for authentication
- Supports both Microsoft Customer Agreement and Enterprise Agreements (EA)
- Includes enhancements to RI recommendations and RI usage data and the addition of amortized cost
- Performance improvements
New Workplace Analytics connector
Microsoft Workplace Analytics uses data from everyday work in Office 365 to identify collaboration patterns that impact productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement. Help your customers speed transformation using new insights about the way their people and teams work.
Query diagnostics
Query Diagnostics is a powerful new feature that will allow you to determine what the Mashup Engine is doing during authoring time. While we’ll be expanding on this feature in the future, including allowing you to use it during full refreshes, at this time it allows you to understand what sort of queries you are emitting, what slowdowns you might run into during authoring refresh, and what kind of background events are happening.
To enable it, enable ‘Query Diagnostics’ under ‘Preview Features’ in Options.
To start diagnostics, in the Power Query Editor click on the ‘Tools’ pane in the Ribbon and select ‘Start Diagnostics’. To finish and aggregate the traces, press ‘Stop Diagnostics’. Whenever you start diagnostics, Power Query will begin tracing any evaluations that you cause.
The evaluation that most users think of is when you press refresh, or when you retrieve data for the first time, but there are many actions that can cause evaluations depending on the connector. For example, with the SQL connector, when you retrieve a list of values to filter, that would kick off an evaluation as well—but it doesn’t associate with a user query, and that’s represented in the diagnostics. Other system-generated queries might include Navigator or “Get Data” experience.
With this first version of the feature, we present two different diagnostic views—a summarized and a detailed view.
The basic view is aimed to give you an immediate insight into where time is being spent in your query. The detailed view is much deeper, line by line, and will generally only be needed for serious debugging by power users.
Some capabilities, like the “Data Source Query” column, are currently available only on certain connectors. We will be working to extend the breadth of this coverage in the future.
You can find more information about Query Diagnostics, including all diagnostics information fields exposed by this feature and their semantics in this documentation article.
Data profiling enhancements
This month we’re introducing a couple of significant enhancements to our Data Profiling capabilities within the Power Query Editor, including:
Multiple Grouping options for the Column Profile pane value distribution visual, specific by column type, in addition to the existing “By Value” criteria:
- Text: By Text Length (number of characters).
- Number: By Sign (positive/negative) and Parity (even/odd).
- Date/DateTime: By Year, Month, Day, Week of Year, Day of Week, AM/PM Time and Hour within a day.
- And more for other data types (Logical True/False), etc.
Filter options: Not only can you now leverage several type-specific grouping criteria within the Colum Profiles distribution pane but also we’ve enabled filtering from within the callouts for each of the values in the distribution chart when the grouping criteria is applied. For example, you can easily exclude all values that fall in a given Month right from the Data Profiles pane for a Date/DateTime column.
Watch the following video to learn more about our data preparation updates:
Project Web App
This month’s template app aimed at helping project, portfolio and resource managers who work in Project Web App visualize their work. The report model was built using the Project Web App data connector. It can be connected to your own Project Web App data using your own credentials. This template app is comprised of 13 visually rich report pages to support the PWA management needs.
Below is one of the many Portfolio Management report pages.
And here’s an example of a Resource Management report page.
The reports enable users to do a deep-dive analysis on project management, resource management and portfolio management views. Overall, this report provides a great out-of-box experience for managers using PWA to take their data to the next level.
- This template includes 6 report pages offering analysis on portfolios of projects including views of a Portfolio Dashboard, Portfolio Timeline, Portfolio Costs, Portfolio Milestones, and Portfolio Issues and Risks.
- It also includes 5 report pages with analysis on resourcing across projects including views of a Resource Overview, Resource Availability, Resource Assignments, specific Resource Details, and a predictive analysis Resource Demand Forecast.
- For individual projects, there are 2 report pages with detailed project information for single projects including a dive on Project Status and Project Issues and Risks.
You can install the app right in the Power BI service and set its parameters to your PWA site URL, and the language your site is in. Once you install it, the report is now yours, so you can customize and share as much as you want.
To learn more about this template app, check out this template’s documentation.
Download this app from AppSource.
Microsoft partners can create their own template apps to publish in the marketplace. If you’re interested in this, be sure to check out our documentation to get started and latest features blog post.
Watch the following video to learn more about Project Web App Template:
New file format: .pbids
This month we are releasing a new file format: PBIDS, to streamline the “Get Data” experience for report creators in your organization. It’s recommended that admins create these files for commonly used connections to help the getting started experience for new report authors.
When an author opens a .PBIDS file, Power BI Desktop will launch and prompt for authentication to connect to the data source specified in the file. Then the navigation dialog will pop-up and the user will need to select the tables to load into the model. They may also need to select the database(s) if one was not specified in the file. From there the user can start building visualizations or revisit “Recent sources” to load a new set of tables into the model.
For the admin to create this file, they will need to specify in the file the required inputs for a single connection and they can specify the mode of the connection. The “mode” can be either “DirectQuery” or “Import”. If “mode” is missing/null, the user that opens the file in Desktop will be prompted to select DirectQuery or Import.
Here is an example of a PBIDS file for a SQL Server connection:
{
“version”: “0.1”,
“connections”: [
{
“details”: {
“protocol”: “tds”,
“address”: {
“server”: “<<server-name>>”,
“database”: “<<db-name (Optional)>>”
}
},
“options”: {},
“mode”: “DirectQuery”
}
]
}
And here’s an example for a SharePoint list. Please note that the URL must point to the SharePoint site itself and not to a list within the site. The user will get a navigator which allows them to select one or more lists from that site which will each become a table in the model.
{
“version”: “0.1”,
“connections”: [
{
“details”: {
“protocol”: “sharepoint-list”,
“address”: {
“url”: “<Sharepoint Site URL>”
}
}
}
]
}
More examples can be found in our documentation page.
Watch the following video to learn more about this new file format:
Performance improvements for modeling operations
We have made a performance improvement in the Analysis Services engine to speed up modeling operations (such as adding measures or calculated columns, creating relationships, etc.) when the model satisfies the following conditions:
- Contains a lot of calculations
- Uses any of the UseRelationship or CrossFilter functions
- Uses any of the Today, Now, Random, etc. volatile functions
While the actual improvement you’ll see will be highly dependent on the model, we have seen 20x performance improvement for some customers when doing things like opening the file and adding a measure.
That’s all for this month! We hope that you enjoy these updates for the month. Please continue sending us your feedback and don’t forget to vote for other features that you’d like to see in the Power BI Desktop. For any preview features, you can always give us your feedback in our active community. You can also download the .pbix file I used, and if you’re looking for a similar design for your reports, I was using the Microsoft layout from PowerBI.Tips.
Power BI Report Server September 2019 Feature Summary
We’re happy to announce our September 2019 update of Power BI Report Server! This release is packed with tons of reporting features, including visual level filters for slicers, Icon sets, grouping for visuals, new default themes, and more! In this release, you will also see the new updated pane design, the new filtering experience, and more conditional formatting options. Read on to learn more about the new features and many other new capabilities.
Here’s the complete list of September updates:
Updated pane design
We’ve refreshed much of our interface. We’ve updated all our panes, the footer, and view switcher to be a lighter color, updated spacing, and new icons. Our new look is much more modern and is the first step and refreshing the entire interface.
Visual level filters for slicers
You can now finally add a visual level filter to slicers. This has been a popular idea on ideas.powerbi.com. It works just like any other visual level filter. It will just filter the slicer itself and no other visuals. This can be useful for filtering out blanks or if you want to use measure filters.
The filter that the slicer applies to other visuals doesn’t change – it’s still just the selection made of the value in the slicer. In the example above, Power BI doesn’t also wrap the ‘Avg. Sales > 1000’ filter into the filter applied to other visuals.
Sorting for the performance analyzer pane
We have a small update to our new performance analyzer pane this release as well! You can change the sort direct and pick to sort between:
- Total time spent
- Order the actions occurred
- Time spent for the DAX query
- Time spent querying the source (for Direct Query)
- Time spent displaying the visual
We’ve seen users add helpful information for their end users to reports, such as hints on how to interact with the report or descriptions of the fields used in the visual. Setting that up though used to take a fair amount of work, so we’ve now added a way to add a tooltip directly to the visual’s header.
This option is off by default, but you can turn it on through the visual header tooltip icon toggle in the visual header card of the formatting pane. This is the one toggle within the card that affects if the icon shows in edit mode, as well as reading mode.
Once the toggle is on, you’ll see a question mark icon in the visual’s header, , and you’ll see a new formatting card in the pane called visual header tooltip. In this card you can add the text to show in the tooltip and the formatting of the tooltip. Alternatively, you can pick a report page tooltip instead if you need more customization.
Once you’ve added tooltip text or selected a report page tooltip, you’ll see it on hover over the question mark icon.
Table & matrix total label customization
There was a lot of buzz in our community around a simple ask for allowing the total label for table and matrix to be customized. An engineer on our team saw the request and decided to squeeze the feature in on his free time to help out our customers! So now, you have the option to change the label under the subtotals card for both columns and rows.
You can also customize the label for each subtotal field when stepped layout is off.
Sync slicer support for hierarchy slicer
The hierarchy slicer, one of the most used marketplace visuals, allows users to display a hierarchy within their slicer for optimized navigation. This is a very powerful visual, but until recently, it had a limitation where it couldn’t work with our sync slicer feature. With this update, we’ve improved our sync slicer feature to support hierarchy slicers now. This support could also extend to other marketplace visuals, if those visuals add support for the right capabilities. Some things to be aware of are that you can’t sync two hierarchy slicers that have different columns from your model, and if you remove columns from one slicer, it will not remove it from the other synced slicers.
Consistent font sizes across visuals
If you’ve been building reports for a while, you may have noticed that when you set the font size to a specific size, such as “8”, the size might look different, depending on where you’ve been setting it. The reason for this is that different places were either using pixels or points to represent the font size, and 8 pixels is a different size compared to 8 points. We’ve updated all the formatting options within our visuals to always use points.
Icon sets for table and matrix
The top request on our Ideas site is for KPI icons for reports, and we are excited to release icon sets for our table and matrix visual. This feature will let you set up rules for showing different sets of icons to show in your table and matrix, very similar to the Icon Sets feature in Excel.
You can turn on icons for your table or matrix just like any other conditional formatting feature, either through the contextual menu for the field you want to apply it to or through the conditional formatting card in the formatting pane.
When you turn on Icons, the default rules will apply a red diamond to the lower 33% of your data, a yellow triangle to the middle 33%, and a green circle to the upper 33%.
For each rule you can set the range based on an absolute number or a percent. You can also customize the icon for each rule with any of the icons we support in our icon picker.
In addition to adjusting current rules, you can add new rules to the list using the New rule button and swap the order of the icons in all the rules with one click using the Reverse icon order button.
In this dialog, you can also change the field used to generate the icons, just like in other forms of conditional formatting. You can also choose, using the Icon layout dropdown, if the icon shows to the left or right of the numbers showing in the cell or if the icons should replace the numbers all together.
You can also control the icon alignment, switching between top, middle, and bottom alignment.
You can also format based on fields in your model, where the fields uses the name of any of our existing icons, defines svgs inline, or references an image or gif online.
For example, you can create a measure like:
Icon Set Measure = SWITCH( TRUE(), SUM(Sales[Units]) < 200, "data:image/svg+xml;utf8, <svg xmlns='https://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 100 100'> <circle cx='50' cy='50' r='40' stroke='purple' stroke-width='4' fill='purple' /> </svg>", SUM(Sales[Units]) < 1000, "StarMediumLight", "https://i.gifer.com/Omjx.gif" )
And apply it to get a completely custom set of icons.
You can also change icons or add new ones through a theme file. For example the below theme will add 2 new icons and replace the half filled yellow star with a different icon.
{ "name": "CustomIcons", "icons": { "fire": { "url": "https://i.gifer.com/Omjx.gif", "description": "Fire!" }, "explosion": { "url": "https://i.gifer.com/3iCN.gif", "description": "Boom!" }, "StarMediumLight": { "url": "https://www.uscsd.k12.pa.us/cms/lib/PA01000033/Centricity/Domain/1/library-icon.png", "description": {"resourceKey": "Icon_ColoredArrowUpRed"} } } }
Each icon you are adding or modifying will get its own group in the icons section of the theme. The structure of each icon is:
"IconID": { "url" : " https://i.gifer.com/3iCN.gif ", "description": "Boom!" }
The IconID section is either a unique name you are giving a custom icon or the id of any of our built-in icons you want to modify. The URL is where you’d include either a link to web image you want to reference or embed your SVG or base64 encoded image. Lastly, the description is what will be used for the tooltip of the icon and read out by a screen reader.
If you are using SVGs either through measures or the theme file, make sure to include the viewBox section of the code, where the viewBox is the original canvas size that was used when the SVG icon was made. This will ensure the SVG will continue to scale as the font size of your values changes.
"data:image/svg+xml;utf8, <svg xmlns='https://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 100 100'> <circle cx='50' cy='50' r='40' stroke='purple' stroke-width='4' fill='purple' /> </svg>"
We’ve also added an icon set picker to the conditional formatting dialog. This will give you a fast way to select a set of icons and rules to start with and then customize from there, which should save you some time manually selecting icons for each individual rule.
Percent support for conditional formatting by rules
In addition to adding a new type of conditional formatting, we’ve extended in general our Rules form of conditional formatting to support Percent, which allows you to apply formatting on a dynamic range of data, instead of having to specify an absolute number that can become absolute as data refreshes. We also added the Reverse button from the Icon dialog for colors as well, so it’s easier to quick swap the direction of your rules.
New filter pane is now generally available
Our new filter pane is now generally available in Power BI Report Server. Any new reports should automatically have the new pane on by default and we are starting the process to transition current reports to the new pane as well. We obviously want to do this in a way that will minimize the impact on your current reports. With that in mind, when you open Power BI Report Server for the first time, we’ll show you a filter pane auto-update dialog. Make sure to take advantage of this opportunity, as we will eventually auto-update all existing report to the new filter pane.
Through this dialog, you can opt into using the new filter pane experience. Once you do this, anytime you open an old report it will show the new filter pane automatically. If you save the report after opening it, the new pane will now persist, and once you publish the report again, it will show for you end users. If you’re not ready to upgrade a specific report, you can turn off the new pane through the report level settings in the options dialog.
If you’re not ready to switch to the new experience, you can close out the auto-update dialog or choose to opt out at this time. You’ll still see the old pane for your reports, but when you’re ready, you can opt in through the dialog the next time you open a report.
Data colors support when using play axis on scatter charts
As a smaller formatting improvement this release, you can now set the data color for the scatter chart when using the play axis. Up until now, you could only using data colors when using a scatter chart without a play axis, so this should add more flexibility when designing your reports if you’re using the play axis.
Performance improves when using relative date and dropdown slicers
If you are using the relative date slicer or the dropdown slicer, you should see some performance improvements for page loads and filtering interactions this release. The relative date slicer will no longer run any DAX queries when loading, and the dropdown slicer will only run queries when you expand the dropdown. The more slicers you had on your page, the bigger performance improvement you should see.
Grouping visuals
We are very happy to announce the release of one of the most exciting demos from the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, grouping. Grouping allows you to group visuals, shapes, textboxes, images, and buttons together on your report page just like you can do in PowerPoint. Once objects are grouped together, you’ll be able to move and resize them all together. This should make it a lot easier to work with reports with lots of objects layered on each page.
To group visuals, you can ctrl+click them and right click to select the group option.
Right-clicking a group will give you an option to ungroup them later.
Generally, by default, the behavior mimics PowerPoint exactly, such as:
- Clicking on the empty space within the group will not select anything
- Clicking on a visual within a group will select the entire group on first click and the individual visual on second click
- Selecting a group and another object on the page and then selecting the Group option will create a nested group
- Use the selection pane to hide everything in the group at once (and bookmark it if you)
There are a few ways we’ve extended the feature as well, including:
- Use the selection pane to drag and drop objects in and out of groups
- Selecting two groups and opening the context menu will give you an option to merge the groups into one group instead of nesting them
- Using the formatting pane, you can add a background color to a group. If a group has a background, it now has “substance” so you can click on the background of the group to select it.
Groups, since they aren’t actual content on the report page, don’t affect the tab order of your report page. Grouping is also only supported on reports using our new modern header, so if you have an older report still using the previous header, upgrade it in the Options dialog to take advantage of this feature.
Color and text classes in themes
When writing your own custom theme JSON file, we know it can be quite difficult to build a theme that changes the entire look of your report. For example, if you wanted to create a dark theme that set the page to a dark color and use white text on top, you’d have to change a ton of settings through the visual styles section of the JSON, which can be very time consuming and error prone.
To help with this, we’ve expanded the color classes within our theme file to allow you format many of the colors in your theme without needing to touch visual styles. If you’re already writing theme files, you’re likely already using a few existing color classes: foreground, background, and tableAccent, which update various settings within your report with one line. With this update, we’re adding new color classes to that list, which as a result, means you can color all visual elements in a report just by setting 6 colors.
The color classes you now have available and what they format are:
In addition to color classes, we’ve added text classes to make it easier and quicker to set text styles. There are 4 primary text classes that adjust a total of 14 total text classes. You can set the font family, font size, and font color for each text classes. The four main text classes are: “Title”, “Label”, “Callout”, and “Header”.
The Title and Label classes have several secondary classes that are automatically derived from the primary class settings but can be formatted individually. For example, if you set the label class, which for example is used for the values in a table to 10pt, a “Small Label,” which is for example used the search box text in slicers, would be automatically set to 9pt. The goal of the primary/secondary text classes is to make it quick and easy for you to set the text classes, which still maintaining a visual hierarchy to the text.
The below table shows the primary classes with example settings and the secondary classes with the settings that make them unique compared to their associated primary class.
Primary class | Secondary classes | Class name in JSON | Settings | Associated visual objects |
Callout | N/A | callout | DIN
#252423 45pt |
Card data labels
KPI indicators |
Header | N/A | header | Segoe UI Semibold
#252423 12pt |
Key influencers headers |
Title | title | DIN
#252423 12pt |
Category axis title Value axis title Multi-row card title * Slicer header |
|
Large title | largeTitle | 14pt | Visual title | |
Label | label | Segoe UI
#252423 10pt |
Table and matrix column headers Matrix row headers Table and matrix grid Table and matrix values |
|
Semibold | semiboldLabel | Segoe UI Semibold | Key influencers profile text | |
Large | largeLabel | 12pt | Multi-row card data labels | |
Small | smallLabel | 9pt | Reference line labels * Slicer date range labels Slicer numeric input text style Slicer search box Key influencers influencer text |
|
Light | lightLabel | #605E5C | Legend text Button text Category Axis labels Funnel chart data labels Funnel chart conversion rate labels Gauge target Scatter chart category label Slicer items |
|
Bold | boldLabel | Segoe UI Bold | Matrix subtotals Matrix grand totals Table totals |
|
Large and Light | largeLightLabel | #605E5C
12pt |
Card category labels Gauge labels Multi-row card category labels |
|
Small and Light | smallLightLabel | #605E5C
9pt |
Data labels Value axis labels |
* The font color for these settings is based on the data colors, not the text class settings.
For example, here’s a small theme that sets some of these properties:
{
“name”: “NewThemeOptions”,
“foreground”: “#252423”,
“foregroundNeutralSecondary”: “#605E5C”,
“foregroundNeutralTertiary”: “#B3B0AD”,
“background”: “#FFFFFF”,
“backgroundLight”: “#F3F2F1”,
“backgroundNeutral”: “#C8C6C4”,
“tableAccent”: “#118DFF”,
“textClasses”: {
“callout”: {
“fontSize”: 45,
“fontFace”: “DIN”,
“color”: “#252423”
},
“title”: {
“fontSize”: 12,
“fontFace”: “DIN”,
“color”: “#252423”
},
“header”: {
“fontSize”: 12,
“fontFace”: “Segoe UI Semibold”,
“color”: “#252423”
},
“label”: {
“fontSize”: 10,
“fontFace”: “Segoe UI”,
“color”: “#252423”
}
}
}
You can still use visual styles to set any specific formatting you want, and that will override any color or text classes that have been set. We expect with these new changes for most users to stick to the color and text classes the majority of the time, and only use the visual styles for non-color/text options (such as turning titles on/off by default).
New default themes
To go along with the new theme JSON options, we are also updating the themes available for reports and changing the default theme for new reports.
Our design and research team spent quite a bit of time developing a new set of themes that have more variety (such as Innovate, a dark theme) and show off more theme-able feature (such as Bloom, with it’s background image).
The new default theme is meant to both align better with Microsoft’s design language and follow best design practices for visuals. We also tested it thoroughly to ensure it’s design is an improvement over other themes, with the goal that the new default makes it easier to create beautiful reports out of the box.
Some visual updates with the new default theme are:
- Larger, darker, more readable text
- Smaller bubble sizes for scatter and map visuals
- Wider line strokes for line and combo charts
- Updated layout for pie and donut charts to improve readability
- Expand/collapse on by default for matrices
- Backgrounds on for visuals by default
You can still find the previous themes under the “More themes” submenu any time you want to reach them. One thing to remember around custom themes is that they always build on top of the default theme. So for example, if you created your own custom theme that just set the data colors and nothing else, if you imported that theme into a report with the new default applied, it would still have expand/collapse on by default, backgrounds on for visuals, etc., so it may look different compared to when you imported it to a report with the old default theme. If you want your theme to look exactly the same way it did previously, you can first set the theme to “Classic” in the theme dropdown, so the default theme has the old settings and then import your custom theme.
Custom format strings
While in the modeling view, you can now enter in a custom format string to customize how the field will show in visuals.
To do this, first select the field in the fields list and select the custom format option in the formatting card of the properties pane.
From there, you’ll be able to select from a list of commonly used format strings.
Or you can use the given an input box to enter in your own format string. Power BI will support most of the VBA style syntax, with a few exceptions. Refer to the full documentation for details.
Once you enter in your custom format string, it will immediately be reflected in the data view and report view.
One of our returning interns, Chelsie Eiden, worked on this feature over the summer. You might remember her from the theme picker that she worked on last year! It’s great to have interns come back to the Power BI team – hopefully you’ll see more of Chelsie again in the future.
Conditional formatting updates for formatting options
Visual background and title colors
We are extending our conditional formatting option to formatting features this release. First, we’ve added support for conditionally formatting the visual’s background and both the visual title’s font color and background color.
Card colors
For the card visual you can now also conditionally format the data label and category label colors.
Gauge fill and colors
You can conditionally format the fill color of the gauge and other colors used for the gauge visual.
-
Target text color
- Target fill color
- Data label color
- Callout value color
Alt text (General)
Alt text is the first feature that now has conditional formatting. This is really a huge step forward in terms of accessibility. Alt text, which is read off by screen readers whenever the visuals are in focus, can now be dynamically changed based on the current filter state of the visual. You can for example call out in the alt text both the highest and the lowest categories and have confidence it will always reflect the current data in the visual.
Border color (Border)
Border color is the next feature that has this added capability. Just as you can with backgrounds, you can dynamically adjust the border color based on current filter state. This could be a good option to use if you want to color a visual based on a specific KPI but you felt like the background color was too intense of an option.
With all these updates, you now have a lot more expressive power when formatting your visuals.
Conditional formatting warnings
Over the last several months, we’ve expanded the number of places you can apply conditional formatting to include settings such as titles and font colors to name just a few. As we’ve mentioned before, our goal is to eventually support conditional formatting for most, if not all, formatting properties. Given how prevalent conditional formatting will become with all these changes, we also wanted to make it easy to see errors in your conditional formatting configuration.
Now, we’ll show a warning in the visual header and the formatting pane if one of the following cases is true:
- The measure’s data type is not what the formatting property expects (e.g. the measure returns a number, but the property is a string)
- The measure used to conditionally format was deleted
- The measure returns an unrecognized value (ex. Rad instead of Red)
These warnings will only show up when editing a report, end users won’t see the warnings when viewing the report.
We’ve heard feedback that end users don’t always know when they can drill through on a visual to another report page. To help with this, we’ve added text to the visual’s tooltip to let them know it’s enabled.
New DAX expressions: REMOVEFILTERS and CONVERT
We have two new DAX expressions this month! REMOVEFILTERS is the same as ALL when used inside CALCULATE to remove filters. CONVERT changes the expression to another data type.
New DAX comparison operator: ==
Our DAX update for the month is the addition of a new comparison operator, ==. This operator is similar to the existing = operator except that it performs strict comparison to BLANK values. In DAX, 0 = BLANK() returns true so a filter like [Column] = 0 or [column] = BLANK() will return true for both 0 and BLANK(). We’ve introduced this new == operator to make it easier to differentiate between 0 and BLANK(). [Column] == 0 will return true only when the column value is 0 and [Column] == BLANK() is equivalent to ISBLANK([Column]).
Improvements to M Intellisense
Based on recent feedback, we’re making additional improvements to the M Intellisense capabilities that we released a few months ago.
- Parameter hint support in formula bar – This previously only worked in the Advanced Editor and Add Custom Column dialogs. This release, we’re adding support for parameter hints in the formula bar.
- Hover support – Hovering your mouse cursor over identifiers (such as functions and query step names) will display its definition. This works on all M Intellisense surfaces (Advanced Editor, Custom Column and formula bar).
New Transform: Split column by positions
A new data transformation added this month allows you to split text columns at specific positions within a given text value.
This new transformation can be found under the Split Column menu in the Home tab of the Power Query Editor ribbon.
You can specify a comma-separated list of positions to split at. Power Query also tries to detect and make recommendations for those positions based on data in preview rows within the Power Query Editor. You can also customize whether to output text parts as new columns or rows.
Copy to clipboard from data profiling
With this month’s release we’re making it possible to export data profiling information by copying it to the clipboard from the Power Query Editor.
The new Copy option is available from all Data Profiling surfaces as described below.
Data Profiling Surface |
Screenshot |
Data exported to clipboard |
Column Quality Summary |
|
|
Column Distribution charts |
|
|
Column Profile Details Pane – Column statistics |
|
|
Column Profile Details Pane – Column distribution |
|
|
That’s all for the September release of Power BI Report Server! We hope that you enjoy these updates for this release. Please continue sending us your feedback and don’t forget to vote for other features that you’d like to see in the Power BI.
Paginated Reports in Power BI September 2019 Feature Summary
Welcome back to another “New Feature Friday” for Paginated Reports in the Power BI service. We’re pleased to announce three new features rolling out around paginated reports this week.
Comments for Paginated Reports
You may now add comments to your paginated reports in Power BI. To add a comment, just click the Comments button in the report toolbar and type your comment in the right-hand pane. Unlike Power BI reports, however, these are supported at the report level only, and not per visual.
Secure Embed support
You may now easily embed your paginated reports in other applications or BI portals using the Secure Embed feature just as you can other Power BI content. This feature includes support for URL parameters, which we announced support for in August, for your scenarios as well. You may choose this option from the File menu in the report toolbar.
RDL Migration Tool on Github
To assist customers with moving reports from SQL Server Reporting Services to Power BI, we’ve released our summer intern project to the community on Github. As part of the migration process, the tool will:
• Convert any shared data sources and datasets in these report files to be embedded in the report and save the files locally to disk.
• Check for unsupported datasources or report components when uploading to Power BI
• Save the converted files that pass these checks to a specified Power BI Workspace.
• Provide a summary of the successful and unsuccessful assets migrated
It is available now, so feel free to check it out on github where you can even contribute to the ongoing development of the tool and help expand its capabilities.
Thanks as always for your feedback and please let us know what you think about these latest updates in the comments below. Look for a blog post in the very near future around the September 2019 release of Power BI Report Server as well!
Power BI Dataflows September 2019 Feature Summary
We are excited to announce new improvements to Power BI dataflows releasing this month including non-admin gateway support and further improvements to the enhanced compute engine. We also have released a new best practices guide for dataflows to help you make the best use of the new enhanced compute engine.
Dataflows now allows users to create data sources against gateways they are a member of. Prior to this update, users would need to be an admin of the gateway before they could create a dataflow against the respective data source. A new user field now shows during gateway selection to show you which gateways you are a user of vs which you are an admin of.
Current limitations with Non-admin gateways
The blank connector is currently unsupported but will be supported in the coming months. Also, if you wish to use different credentials for the underlying data source, this currently does not work and will result in an error when trying to create or refresh. This is a current limitation with dataflows, and we hope to soon support this.
We have made a range of improvements and bug fixes over the last couple of weeks which should result in improved refresh times and stability when refreshing. Also, we have now rolled out to multiple regions. There are still some regions which are not supported but we hope to enable them by the end of the calendar year.
Check out the new best practices document for dataflows which goes through some of the most common user problems and how to best make use of the enhanced compute engine. The document can be found here
Power BI Service and Mobile August 2019 feature summary
The month of August was yet another busy one for the Power BI team. We continued to roll out new features and make updates across the stack. Here’s a quick recap of all the announcements in case you missed it:
New capacity settings for Power BI Premium
We started off by announcing five new settings for your Premium capacities in the admin portal. Now, you can set limits on “Max Offline Dataset Size” with the allowable range from 0.1 to 10 GB and even set limits on queries to prevent noisy reports from impacting others using the capacity. You can use these new settings to create a more predictable and performant capacity for your organization. Learn more
Custom branding for your organization
We announced custom branding for the Power BI service. Now, you change the theme color that appears in the top navigation bar, add your company logo, and bring your default landing page to life by adding a cover image. Check out the announcement blog to learn more.
August update for On-premises data gateway
We shipped a new, improved version of the on-premises data gateway in August with an updated mashup engine to match the Power BI desktop version. Install the new gateway. Documentation on the new gateway, how to use it, and list of FAQs can be found here.
Summarized data export with build permission
We heard your feedback loud and clear that our limitations on export of summarized data from a visual are overly restrictive. In reaction, we adjusted our approach to allow users with the Read permission to export summarized data from a visual. Please note that exporting the underlying data for a visual will continue to require Build permission. The underlying data is the detailed rows that were rolled up to show in the visual. Check out the announcement blog for more details.
URL parameters for paginated reports
We brought the ability to use URL parameters for paginated reports. Now, report authors to send commands to paginated reports in Power BI by adding a parameter to a URL. For example, you can pass report parameters to a report by including them in a paginated report URL, and even construct this URL dynamically in a Power BI report and drillthrough to a paginated report by using a DAX measure. Learn more
Support for monthly e-mail subscriptions
We continued to add more granular controls to e-mail subscriptions in the Power BI service by adding an option for you to subscribe monthly to reports, dashboards, and paginated reports. Learn more
AAD app proxy integration for Mobile
We partnered with Azure Active Directory team to integrate Power BI mobile applications with Azure Active Directory (AAD) Application Proxy. With this feature, you can now connect to Report Server hosted within your orgranization from Power BI Mobile app, without the need to set up complex on-premise configuration. Read more on Power BI mobile and Azure AD Application Proxy integration. Learn how to configure Azure AD Application Proxy and Power BI.
Power BI Desktop September 2019 Feature Summary
You’ll notice one of our exciting updates right away when creating new reports with the September update of Power BI Desktop, a new, modern default theme! Not only do we have a new default theme, but we’ve more than doubled the number of built-in theme options for your report. If you’re a theme author, potentially more exciting are the updates to our theme JSON format which make it much quicker and easier for you to create your own custom themes that significantly change the look and feel of your report. Thanks to an intern project, we’re also releasing a frequently requested modeling feature: custom format strings. And of course, we have plenty of incremental improvements this month, with some performance improvements, more dynamic formatting options, updates to our personalized visualization pane, and more.
As a final reminder, starting this month, we are only releasing our new single .exe installer that has all the languages wrapped into it. If you’re automatically downloading it from the Download Center each month, you’ll need to update your scripts. You can learn more about how to do this in our documentation. We have also added some guidance at the end of this post.
Here’s the complete list of September updates:
For a summary of the major updates, you can watch the following video:
Color and text classes in themes
When writing your own custom theme JSON file, we know it can be quite difficult to build a theme that changes the entire look of your report. For example, if you wanted to create a dark theme that set the page to a dark color and use white text on top, you’d have to change a ton of settings through the visual styles section of the JSON, which can be very time consuming and error prone.
To help with this, we’ve expanded the color classes within our theme file to allow you format many of the colors in your theme without needing to touch visual styles. If you’re already writing theme files, you’re likely already using a few existing color classes: foreground, background, and tableAccent, which update various settings within your report with one line. With this update, we’re adding new color classes to that list, which as a result, means you can color all visual elements in a report just by setting 6 colors.
The color classes you now have available and what they format are:
In addition to color classes, we’ve added text classes to make it easier and quicker to set text styles. There are 4 primary text classes that adjust a total of 14 total text classes. You can set the font family, font size, and font color for each text classes. The four main text classes are: “Title”, “Label”, “Callout”, and “Header”.
The Title and Label classes have several secondary classes that are automatically derived from the primary class settings but can be formatted individually. For example, if you set the label class, which for example is used for the values in a table to 10pt, a “Small Label,” which is for example used the search box text in slicers, would be automatically set to 9pt. The goal of the primary/secondary text classes is to make it quick and easy for you to set the text classes, which still maintaining a visual hierarchy to the text.
The below table shows the primary classes with example settings and the secondary classes with the settings that make them unique compared to their associated primary class.
Primary class | Secondary classes | Class name in JSON | Settings | Associated visual objects |
Callout | N/A | callout | DIN
#252423 45pt |
Card data labels
KPI indicators |
Header | N/A | header | Segoe UI Semibold
#252423 12pt |
Key influencers headers |
Title | title | DIN
#252423 12pt |
Category axis title Value axis title Multi-row card title * Slicer header |
|
Large title | largeTitle | 14pt | Visual title | |
Label | label | Segoe UI
#252423 10pt |
Table and matrix column headers Matrix row headers Table and matrix grid Table and matrix values |
|
Semibold | semiboldLabel | Segoe UI Semibold | Key influencers profile text | |
Large | largeLabel | 12pt | Multi-row card data labels | |
Small | smallLabel | 9pt | Reference line labels * Slicer date range labels Slicer numeric input text style Slicer search box Key influencers influencer text |
|
Light | lightLabel | #605E5C | Legend text Button text Category Axis labels Funnel chart data labels Funnel chart conversion rate labels Gauge target Scatter chart category label Slicer items |
|
Bold | boldLabel | Segoe UI Bold | Matrix subtotals Matrix grand totals Table totals |
|
Large and Light | largeLightLabel | #605E5C
12pt |
Card category labels Gauge labels Multi-row card category labels |
|
Small and Light | smallLightLabel | #605E5C
9pt |
Data labels Value axis labels |
* The font color for these settings is based on the data colors, not the text class settings.
For example, here’s a small theme that sets some of these properties:
{ "name": "NewThemeOptions", "foreground": "#252423", "foregroundNeutralSecondary": "#605E5C", "foregroundNeutralTertiary": "#B3B0AD", "background": "#FFFFFF", "backgroundLight": "#F3F2F1", "backgroundNeutral": "#C8C6C4", "tableAccent": "#118DFF", "textClasses": { "callout": { "fontSize": 45, "fontFace": "DIN", "color": "#252423" }, "title": { "fontSize": 12, "fontFace": "DIN", "color": "#252423" }, "header": { "fontSize": 12, "fontFace": "Segoe UI Semibold", "color": "#252423" }, "label": { "fontSize": 10, "fontFace": "Segoe UI", "color": "#252423" } } }
You can still use visual styles to set any specific formatting you want, and that will override any color or text classes that have been set. We expect with these new changes for most users to stick to the color and text classes the majority of the time, and only use the visual styles for non-color/text options (such as turning titles on/off by default).
Watch the following video to learn more about color and text classes:
New default themes
To go along with the new theme JSON options, we are also updating the themes available for reports and changing the default theme for new reports.
Our design and research team spent quite a bit of time developing a new set of themes that have more variety (such as Innovate, a dark theme) and show off more theme-able feature (such as Bloom, with it’s background image).
The new default theme is meant to both align better with Microsoft’s design language and follow best design practices for visuals. We also tested it thoroughly to ensure it’s design is an improvement over other themes, with the goal that the new default makes it easier to create beautiful reports out of the box.
Some visual updates with the new default theme are:
- Larger, darker, more readable text
- Smaller bubble sizes for scatter and map visuals
- Wider line strokes for line and combo charts
- Updated layout for pie and donut charts to improve readability
- Expand/collapse on by default for matrices
- Backgrounds on for visuals by default
You can still find the previous themes under the “More themes” submenu any time you want to reach them. One thing to remember around custom themes is that they always build on top of the default theme. So for example, if you created your own custom theme that just set the data colors and nothing else, if you imported that theme into a report with the new default applied, it would still have expand/collapse on by default, backgrounds on for visuals, etc., so it may look different compared to when you imported it to a report with the old default theme. If you want your theme to look exactly the same way it did previously, you can first set the theme to “Classic” in the theme dropdown, so the default theme has the old settings and then import your custom theme.
Watch the following video to learn more about our new themes:
Personalized visualization pane improvements (preview)
Unpin default visuals
The first update to the personalized visualization pane this month is the ability to unpin any of the default visuals.
Once you unpin a built-in visual, it moves under the dotted line within the pane, and next time you open a report, it won’t show unless you have that visual type used already within the report, in which case, it will show below the dotted line. This means that the only difference in experience between built-in and custom visuals is that the built-in ones show by default initially.
Some reasons you might want to do this include:
- You never use specific visuals and want to declutter the pane
- You have strong feelings against specific visual types and don’t want to see it as an option
- You’re using a custom visual version of a visual type and don’t want to be mistakenly click on the built-in version you never use.
If you later want the default visuals back, you can use an option to restore the original visuals to the pane.
About info for visuals
Another update is that you can now right click on any visual in the visualization pane to see an About dialog with more information on the visual.
You’ll be able to see things such as the visual’s id, version number, where you got the visual from, and the support information.
Watch the following video to learn more about the personalized visualization pane improvements:
Custom format strings
While in the modeling view, you can now enter in a custom format string to customize how the field will show in visuals.
To do this, first select the field in the fields list and select the custom format option in the formatting card of the properties pane.
From there, you’ll be able to select from a list of commonly used format strings.
Or you can use the given an input box to enter in your own format string. Power BI will support most of the VBA style syntax, with a few exceptions. Refer to the full documentation for details.
Once you enter in your custom format string, it will immediately be reflected in the data view and report view.
One of our returning interns, Chelsie Eiden, worked on this feature over the summer. You might remember her from the theme picker that she worked on last year! It’s great to have interns come back to the Power BI team – hopefully you’ll see more of Chelsie again in the future.
Watch the following video to learn more about custom format strings:
Conditional formatting for more visual formatting options
We’re excited to announce more formatting features this month that can be conditionally formatted, moving us ever closer to our goal of everything within the formatting pane being conditionally formattable.
Alt text (General)
Alt text is the first feature that now has conditional formatting. This is really a huge step forward in terms of accessibility. Alt text, which is read off by screen readers whenever the visuals are in focus, can now be dynamically changed based on the current filter state of the visual. You can for example call out in the alt text both the highest and the lowest categories and have confidence it will always reflect the current data in the visual.
Border color (Border)
Border color is the next feature that has this added capability. Just as you can with backgrounds, you can dynamically adjust the border color based on current filter state. This could be a good option to use if you want to color a visual based on a specific KPI but you felt like the background color was too intense of an option.
Gauge colors
Back in June, we added conditional formatting to fill color for gauge, and this month we are expanding that to four other gauge properties as well:
-
Target text color
- Target fill color
- Data label color
- Callout value color
Watch the following video to learn more about the conditional formatting updates:
Drill through discoverability improvement
We’ve heard feedback that end users don’t always know when they can drill through on a visual to another report page. To help with this, we’ve added text to the visual’s tooltip to let them know it’s enabled.
Watch the following video to learn more about the drill through discoverability improvement:
New DAX expressions: REMOVEFILTERS and CONVERT
We have two new DAX expressions this month! REMOVEFILTERS is the same as ALL when used inside CALCULATE to remove filters. CONVERT changes the expression to another data type.
PowerApps visual now generally available and certified
The PowerApps marketplace visual allows you to add the power of apps to reports and dashboards. The PowerApps visual brings forms and data editing directly to Power BI by allowing you to embed your own PowerApps right in your report or dashboard. And as of this month, the visual is now generally available and certified, allowing you to use the visual in even more places.
PostgreSQL connector enhancements
Support for folding over Native Database queries
The PostgreSQL connector has been enhanced with query folding over a native query. You can now paste in a native query when connecting to a PostgreSQL database, with folding capable operations applied on top according to normal Import or Direct Query logic.
DirectQuery support generally available
We’re happy to announce that the DirectQuery support within the PostgreSQL connect that we announced last month is now generally available.
Copy to clipboard from data profiling
With this month’s release we’re making it possible to export data profiling information by copying it to the clipboard from the Power Query Editor.
The new Copy option is available from all Data Profiling surfaces as described below.
Data Profiling Surface |
Screenshot |
Data exported to clipboard |
Column Quality Summary |
|
|
Column Distribution charts |
|
|
Column Profile Details Pane – Column statistics |
|
|
Column Profile Details Pane – Column distribution |
|
|
Watch the following video to learn more about copy to clipboard from data profiling:
Template apps are a great way to provide Power BI users with installable, ready to use, actionable – quality applications. These templates contain reports, dashboards, and data models that can connect to the user’s data, creating immediate value and action. Each month, we’re highlighting a recent template app that’s released to the marketplace.
Google Analytics report
This month template app is one of the more popular template apps Google Analytics report by Havens consulting. The report model was built using the Google Analytics data connector. It can be connected to your own Google Analytics data using your own credentials.
The report itself enables users to do a deep-dive analysis on daily page views with: forecasting and adjustable rolling average, month-over-month traffic gain or loss, top pages visited, traffic source trends over time, and more. Plus, the report contains many great examples of Power BI features and functionality including bookmarks, what-if parameters, advanced conditional formatting, and custom visuals. Overall this report provides a fantastic out-of-the-box Power BI experience and is a great way to supercharge your Google Analytics data.
You can install the app right in the Power BI service and set its parameters to your google analytics view ID. Once you install it, the report is now yours, so you can customize and share as much as you want.
Microsoft partners can create their own template apps to publish in the marketplace. If you’re interested in this, be sure to check out our documentation to get started.
Download this app from AppSource.
Performance improvements for multi-dimensional models
This month we’ve done work that gives users of Analysis Services 2019 multi-dimensional users general performance improvements. When using the new Release Candidate of SQL Analysis Services 2019 (see https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/whats-new-for-sql-server-2019-analysis-services-rc1/ for details), you’ll see more performant queries and optimization of measure execution. This improvement, which some may know as “Super DAX”, helps reduce the chattiness between Power BI and Analysis Services. Some other features that come with this is multi-dimensional support for expand/collapse on row headers, cross-highlighting support across different tables, and high density sampling for visuals that support it. You will need to enable this setting in Analysis Services to take advantage of it in Power BI.
Query performance improvements for DirectQuery models
This month, we’ve also introduced runtime constant folding to improve query performance for some DirectQuery models. The amount of performance improvements you’ll see will vary depending on the DAX expressions you’re using, the model structure, speed of the DirectQuery source, etc. However, with some early users, we’ve seen some quite significant performance gains.
That’s all for this month! We hope that you enjoy these updates for the month. Please continue sending us your feedback and don’t forget to vote for other features that you’d like to see in the Power BI Desktop. For any preview features, you can always give us your feedback in our active community. You can also download the .pbix file I used, and if you’re looking for a similar design for your reports, I was using the Microsoft layout from PowerBI.Tips.
* Other considerations on extracting MSI from EXE
Installing Power BI Desktop on remote machines
If you’re deploying Power BI Desktop to your users with a tool that requires a Windows installer file (.msi file) you can extract the .msi file from the Power BI Desktop installer .exe file. You can use third-party tools such as the WiX Toolset to do this.
Note: As a third-party product, WiX Toolset options might change without notice. Please check their documentation for the most up to date information, and contact their user mailing list for help.
- On the computer where you downloaded the Power BI Desktop installer, download and install the latest version of the WiX Toolset from the WiX website at https://wixtoolset.org/.
- Open a command line windows as an administrator and navigate to the folder where you installed WiX Toolset.
- Run the following command: Dark.exe <path to Power BI Desktop installer> -x <output folder>
For example, run:
Dark.exe C:\PBIDesktop_x64.exe -x C:\output
- The output folder will contain a folder named ‘AttachedContainer’ that includes the .msi files.
Using command-line options during installation
When installing Power BI Desktop, you can set properties and options with command-line switches. This is especially useful for administrators who manage or facilitate the installation of Power BI Desktop across organizations. These options apply to .msi and .exe installations.
Command-line option | Behavior |
-q, -quiet, -s, -silent | silent install |
-passive | only show the progress bar during installation |
-norestart | suppress the computer restart requirement |
-forcerestart | restart the computer after installation without a prompt |
-promptrestart | prompt the user if computer restart is required (default) |
-l<>, -log<> | log the installation to a specific file, with the file specified in <> |
-uninstall | uninstall Power BI Desktop |
-repair | repair the installation (or install if it’s not currently installed) |
-package, -update | install Power BI Desktop (default, as long as -uninstall or -repair aren’t specified) |
Syntax parameters
The following properties are specified with a “PROPERTY=VALUE” syntax:
ACCEPT_EULA | Requires a value of 1 to automatically accept the EULA |
ENABLECXP | Value of 1 enrolls in the customer experience program that captures telemetry on usage of the product |
INSTALLDESKTOPSHORTCUT | Value of 1 adds a shortcut to the Desktop |
INSTALLLOCATION | File path to where you want it installed |
LANGUAGE | Locale code e.g. en-US, de-DE, pr-BR to force the default language of the application. If no language is specified, Power BI Desktop displays the Windows OS language. This can be changed by the user in the Options dialog. |
REG_SHOWLEADGENDIALOG | Value of 0 disables showing the dialog that appears before you have signed in to Power BI Desktop |
As an example, you’d run it with the following to install without any UI, using the German language: “-quiet LANG=de-DE ACCEPT_EULA=1”
Power BI Desktop August 2019 Feature Summary
Our August release has another hotly anticipated feature from the Microsoft Business Application Summit, grouping. Grouping in reports, similar to PowerPoint’s grouping, lets you easily organize groups of visuals to move and resize them as a set. This month’s release also has some updates to our newest features, such as an icon set picker for our newly added icons conditional formatting and measure support for key influencers.
As a reminder, you’re now downloading a single .exe file that has all the languages wrapped into it. The old .msi installation is still available from the Download Center, but we’ll be deprecating that in September. If you’re automatically downloading it from there each month, you’ll need to update your scripts. If you want to know more about deploying Power BI Desktop remotely through scripts read our documentation.
Here’s the complete list of August updates:
For a summary of the major updates, you can watch the following video:
Grouping visuals
We are very happy to announce the release of one of the most exciting demos from the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, grouping. Grouping allows you to group visuals, shapes, textboxes, images, and buttons together on your report page just like you can do in PowerPoint. Once objects are grouped together, you’ll be able to move and resize them all together. This should make it a lot easier to work with reports with lots of objects layered on each page.
To group visuals, you can ctrl+click them and right click to select the group option.
Right-clicking a group will give you an option to ungroup them later.
Generally, by default, the behavior mimics PowerPoint exactly, such as:
- Clicking on the empty space within the group will not select anything
- Clicking on a visual within a group will select the entire group on first click and the individual visual on second click
- Selecting a group and another object on the page and then selecting the Group option will create a nested group
- Use the selection pane to hide everything in the group at once (and bookmark it if you)
There are a few ways we’ve extended the feature as well, including:
- Use the selection pane to drag and drop objects in and out of groups
- Selecting two groups and opening the context menu will give you an option to merge the groups into one group instead of nesting them
- Using the formatting pane, you can add a background color to a group. If a group has a background, it now has “substance” so you can click on the background of the group to select it.
Groups, since they aren’t actual content on the report page, don’t affect the tab order of your report page. Grouping is also only supported on reports using our new modern header, so if you have an older report still using the previous header, upgrade it in the Options dialog to take advantage of this feature.
We have more plans for grouping the future as well. In a future update, we’ll add different modes to grouping that will change the way the visuals and the group’s container interact with each other. For example, you’ll eventually be able to create a group that scrolls.
Watch the following video to learn more about grouping:
Filter pane auto-update
Last month, we announced the general availability of our new filter pane, and now we are starting the process to transition current reports to the new pane as well. We obviously want to do this in a way that will minimize the impact on your current reports. With that in mind, this month, when you open Power BI Desktop for the first time, we’ll show you a filter pane auto-update dialog. Make sure to take advantage of this opportunity, as we will eventually auto-update all existing report to the new filter pane.
Through this dialog, you can opt into using the new filter pane experience. Once you do this, anytime you open an old report it will show the new filter pane automatically. If you save the report after opening it, the new pane will now persist, and once you publish the report again, it will show for you end users. If you’re not ready to upgrade a specific report, you can turn off the new pane through the report level settings in the options dialog.
If you’re not ready to switch to the new experience, you can close out the auto-update dialog or choose to opt out at this time. You’ll still see the old pane for your reports, but when you’re ready, you can opt in through the dialog the next time you open a report.
Icon style picker for Icons conditional formatting
Last month, we released a new form of conditional formatting, called Icons, that allows you to add icons next to values in your table or matrix based on custom business logic. This month we are improving the usability of this feature by adding an icon set picker to the dialog. This will give you a fast way to select a set of icons and rules to start with and then customize from there, which should save you some time manually selecting icons for each individual rule.
Watch the following video to learn more about icon styles:
Conditional formatting warnings
Over the last several months, we’ve expanded the number of places you can apply conditional formatting to include settings such as titles and font colors to name just a few. As we’ve mentioned before, our goal is to eventually support conditional formatting for most, if not all, formatting properties. Given how prevalent conditional formatting will become with all these changes, we also wanted to make it easy to see errors in your conditional formatting configuration.
Now, we’ll show a warning in the visual header and the formatting pane if one of the following cases is true:
- The measure’s data type is not what the formatting property expects (e.g. the measure returns a number, but the property is a string)
- The measure used to conditionally format was deleted
- The measure returns an unrecognized value (ex. Rad instead of Red)
These warnings will only show up when editing a report, end users won’t see the warnings when viewing the report.
Watch the following video to learn more about conditional formatting warnings:
Key influencers improvements
Measure support
You can now use measures in the Analyze bucket of the key influencers visual. By default, we’ll evaluate the measure based on the fields you include in the Explain by bucket. There’s also a new Expand by bucket in the field well that can be used to refine the level that the measure in the analyze bucket is evaluated at. For example, if you want it to be evaluated over all your data, you can add an ID field to the Expand by bucket.
General availability
With measure support now added, we are very excited to announce the general availability of the key influencers visual. Thank you for all the feedback given during the preview period!
Watch the following video to learn more about the Key influencers visual improvements:
xViz visualization suite by Visual BI
Visual BI, the makers of the ValQ value driver tree visual, are releasing a suite of new visuals available in AppSource called xViz. These in-app purchase visuals are highly customizable and are completely free up until 2000 data points. After that, they have a licensing plan in place that gives you access to all visuals within the suite for one price.
Multiple axis chart
The first visual within the xViz suite is the multiple axis chart. This visual allows you to display up to five separate axis values, each with a unique visual type: column, column stacked, line, spline, area, area stacked or area spline.
To build out this visual, you’ll start by placing the categorical axis field in the Axis bucket. From there, you’ll place each measure you want to display in the value axis buckets. When you place several measures within the same value axis bucket, they’ll share the axis and if you place them in different buckets, they will each have either own unique axis.
From there, there are tons of customizations you can do in the formatting pane. You can customize the visual type using the Series Type card, mixing and matching to get the visual layout you’re looking for.
Some other unique options this visual has include:
- Error bars, horizontal and vertical bands, and horizontal reference lines found in the Analytics card
- A utility menu that allows end users on the Power BI service to export PNGs, lasso select, and zoom (This menu is only supported in the service, not Power BI Desktop).
- Adding pattern fills using the Data Series Pattern card to improve accessibility of your visuals
- Advanced formatting controls for each axis shown in the visual
- Custom text and URL footer through the Miscellaneous card
You can click on the grid icon on the top right of the visual to flip to a table view of the data and filter the rows through a search bar.
You can also click on the pencil icon to open a conditional formatting menu which allows you to write complex conditional formatting rules to apply to any series in the visual. The rules will automatically show in the legend as well (this can be turned off in the formatting pane if needed).
The conditional formatting and either be based on rules or on a color scale.
By combining all these features together, you can create complex and robost visuals to show your data however you need.
Check out this visual on AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the Multiple axis chart:
Marimekko chart
The Marimekko chart, the second xViz visual, lets you visualize categorical data over two scales, using both width and height, to show the relationship between them. You start off this visual with a categorical value you want to show on the value axis From there you can add a measure to define the height of each category and a different measure to set the width. You can also add a category to the legend to split the data further.
Since this visual is part of the xViz suite, it has the same great formatting options we’ve already covered for the Multi-axis chart, including the powerful conditional formatting options and advanced formatting control.
Download this visual from AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the Marimekko chart:
Variance chart
The variance chart, the third visual in the xViz suite, allows you to easily compare multiple metrics, such as forecast versus budget, and see the variance between them. For this visual, you need to add your categorical field, such as time, to the Category bucket in the field well. From there you add the first value you want to compare in the Actual value bucket and the second to the Comparison value bucket. The visual will then show a comparison chart with both values, a variance chart, and a percent variance chart.
In addition to all the general formatting capabilities you get with all xViz visuals, such as conditional formatting, you also have a lot of controls specific to this visual type. For example, you can choose to customize which of these chart types you want to include in the visual and how much space they take up within the Chart Options card of the formatting pane.
You can switch the style of the variance percent chart between oval and square through the formatting pane as well.
You can even change the chart type used for the comparison chart.
You’ll find this visual on AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the Variance chart:
Horizon chart
Lastly, the Horizon chart, which I covered last September, has been upgraded and integrated into the xViz suite.
Find this visual on AppSource.
Watch the following video to learn more about the Horizon chart:
Support for SAP HANA HDI Containers
The SAP HANA connector has been enhanced in this month’s release to enable consumption of views under HANA Deployment Infrastructure (“HDI”) Containers.
Views within HDI Containers are seamlessly showed within the Navigator dialog when using the SAP HANA connector, allowing you to consume them with either Import or DirectQuery mode and operate over them just like with any other view within SAP HANA.
Edit SAP variables in Power BI service (preview)
When using SAP Business Warehouse or SAP HANA with DirectQuery, you can now allow end users to edit SAP variables in the Power BI service
for Premium workspaces.
Note: This is a preview feature that requires the new filter experience and an SSO-enabled gateway. For full details on setup requirements, check out the documentation.
Watch the following video to learn more about editing SAP variables:
PostgreSQL DirectQuery
Another connector enhancement this month provides DirectQuery support within the PostgreSQL connector, enabling you to build reports on top of their PostgreSQL databases without the need to import data.
When launching the PostgreSQL connector, you can now specify DirectQuery as your connectivity mode choice within the connector dialog.
MarkLogic connector now generally available
We’re glad to announce that the MarkLogic connector is now generally available. The MarkLogic connector can be found within the Database category in the Get Data dialog.
New Power Platform category within Get Data
With this month’s release, we’re renaming the Power BI category under Get Data to Power Platform, and bringing the Common Data Service connector into this category, in addition to the Power BI datasets and Power BI dataflows connectors.
This change also lays the foundation for several other enhancements coming to Power BI that will leverage other Power Platform capabilities provided by PowerApps, Flow, and the Common Data Service. Stay tuned!
Facebook Pages – Basic Analysis
Template apps are a great way to provide Power BI users with installable, ready to use, actionable – quality applications. These templates contain reports, dashboards, and data models that can connect to the user’s data, creating immediate value and action.
We are going to start regularly sharing new or popular template apps in this blog, and first up is the Facebook Pages – Basic Analysis template app by DataChant, which provides marketing professionals the simplest way to analyze any Facebook page in Power BI without being the page administrator.
You can install the app right in the Power BI service and set its parameters to import data about up to four Facebook pages.
Once you complete the short set up flow, you’ll be given a dashboard and report that shows how each page performs over time based on their number of posts and shares. Even if you’re not a social media analyst, you can use this template app as a great demo tool to showcase Power BI capabilities. The dashboard and report are now yours, so you can customize and share as much as you want.
Microsoft partners can create their own template apps to publish in the marketplace. If you’re interested in this, be sure to check out our documentation to get started.
Download this app from AppSource.
That’s all for this month! We hope that you enjoy these updates for the month. Please continue sending us your feedback and don’t forget to vote for other features that you’d like to see in the Power BI Desktop. For any preview features, you can always give us your feedback in our active community. You can also download the .pbix file I used, and if you’re looking for a similar design for your reports, I was using the Microsoft layout from PowerBI.Tips.