BI-NSIGHT Power BI Sweet IQ , Summer Release – SSIS Feature Pack for Azure – Excel 2016 New Chart Options (Treemap, Sunburst, Histogram, Box & Whisker, Waterfall)
Well this week there were some updates and fortunately not too many so where we go!
Power BI – Sweet IQ
This week, there was yet another release of a content pack for Power BI, this time it was relating to a company called Sweet IQ.
They position themselves as provider that can leverage your local search and increase your visibility on the web. Whilst looking at the blog post, I have to say that this is once again a great way for customers to get quick and easy access to their data. And enable the customers to interact and see how it is performing.
You can read about the post from Microsoft here: Analyze and Monitor your SweetIQ Data with Power BI
Summer Release of Power BI
I am not going to go into too much detail around this, because all the information that I could find was on the blog post from Microsoft. But it does bode well for the next release of the Power BI Designer.
And for me I think this is where I would start at looking the Power BI Designer over say using Excel as a source or using the web based version to author reports.
As you can see from the above screenshot, it appears that there is going to be a whole host of things that you can customize within the Power BI Designer. And this will make their existing reports, which look really good, go from good, to be a standout. Especially since from what I can see above, I have not seen this in other products of similar nature.
You can read the blog post from Microsoft here: We’re on for a great Designer Summer…
SSIS Feature Pack for Azure
As you can see from the above screenshot, these are the items that are available in the SSIS Feature pack for Azure.
I personally think that this is great, as in the past, it has been a bit of trickery to get data from On Premise into Azure. Personally I know of a few people who have had some struggles. As well as a lot of people who do know and understand SSIS, really well. So this would fit in with their existing skills.
I also did see that the Varigence have created a webinar for this here: Moving ETL Loads to Azure Part1 Webinar Content
I have personally not tested it yet, but I am sure that it will be a lot easier to get data into Azure!
You can read up all about it on MSDN here: Azure Feature Pack
As well as downloading the SSIS Feature Pack here: Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Integration Services Feature Pack for Azure | Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Feature Pack for Azure
Excel 2016 – New Charting Options (Treemap, Sunburst, Histogram, Box & Whisker, Waterfall)
Every week or so, I check to see if there are any Office 2016 updates, and this week there was!
So one of the things that I have been looking for since watching the Ignite video’s is for the new chart types. And finally this week, we have the new chart types in Excel 2016!
The one of the things that I can currently note, and I do hope that this will not be the case once the final product is released, is that it says that it cannot be used with a Pivot Table. I might not totally understand the dynamics behind how the chart is created. But how awesome would it be if we could use it with our data from Power Pivot, or our SSAS Cubes!
I have also noticed that they have changed the multi select button on your slicer to look a little more attractive as shown below.
There might be a few other changes, but currently I have not seen them or found them out!
That is it for this week!