Once again in the past two weeks, the Microsoft machine has been adding more features and user requests to Power BI.

It continues to amaze me at how quickly they can get things into the product, as well as continuing listening to what the community looking for and responding.

Let’s get into all the details!

Power BI – Custom Visuals

I have read and also thought about this during the Power BI Visual contest, in terms of how they were going to be able people to get these amazing new visualisations into the product. And low and behold we now know how this can be achieved.

What amazes me is that they have created something that is so simple (to import the visualization), as well as by keeping it on an open source framework there is never any person who can monetize their visualization. And this is really great because it means that people will share and use other peoples great work. As well as promote Power BI.

I have to be honest I have not seen what the other competitors are doing with regards to this, but I am sure that they must be worried. The pace that Microsoft is delivering changes, as well as extending Power BI back to the users is incredible. And the way I see it, it is leaving the competitors in their dust. And this makes me really happy to be part of the Microsoft story. As well as making my job a whole lot easier.

You can read more about it here: Visualize your data, your way using custom visuals in Power BI

Power BI – Visual Contest Winners

This competition was a great idea from Microsoft and did show how smart and creative people are.

There were some amazing entries and worthy winners.

You can find out more about the competition here: Power BI Best Visual Contest – Announcing the Contest Winners!

Power BI – Using Row Values to answer questions in Q&A

This was something really interesting which I saw in Jen Underwood’s blog post.

It is now that Q&A will not only look for information in the Column names, but also in the row values.

This is really incredible and will mean that you can get even more answers from your data. As well as be able to have more creative questions for your end users.

Power BI – Desktop Update

Once again it was time for the Power BI Desktop update, and they did not disappoint.

There have been quite a few blogs from other people with regards to all of the updates. And they are all really welcome and interesting. It is great to see that they are almost in line with the updates that are happening on the service (Cloud) site.

I am not going to go into all the details, which you can read from the link further below.

But what did catch my eye, and once again I think is yet another smart move from Microsoft is to have the ability to Preview new features. I see this is a smart move, because what it is doing is to show the users of Power BI what is potentially coming down the road. But along with this, it also gives Microsoft the insight to getting valuable feedback from the real world. As well as to see who uses the preview features.

You can find out all the details about the Power BI Desktop Update here: Custom visualizations support and 22 other features in the Power BI Desktop October update

Power BI – Weekly Service Update

Another week starts to come to an end and another Power BI Service update.

This week they have listened to what the community is asking for and made the service updates.

What I really liked is the read-only members for your Power BI Groups. As often you could have spent a lot of time getting everything correct for your dashboards and your reports, to unfortunately get some user modify it.

Also having the ability to add featured questions to Q&A means you can guide and help the user find answers to their questions.

You can find more details here: Power BI Weekly Service Update

Power BI – Mobile App Update

Yet again another great update to the Power BI Mobile App.

This is a great area that they are improving on all the time. Which is really vital due to people being so mobile these days having a good mobile app means that people can leverage all the great work that was previously completed.

Having notifications, as well as making the experience faster means that people will use it more and want to interact with it more. Meaning that it will have a greater adoption with users. Along with improving the charts, as often as they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

You can find out about it all here: Power BI mobile Mid-October updates are here

Power BI – Azure Enterprise Content Pack

This I think is a really great content pack, due to having a lot of things happening in Azure, and it is often good to see what is happening within Azure.

There might be certain departments who are over utilizing Azure, and others who are not doing anything. And this gives you a great ability to see what is happening and great insights.

You can read all about it here: Visualize your Microsoft Azure Enterprise Data with Power BI

Datazen – Publisher Update for Windows 7 App

It is great to see that Microsoft is still investing time and effort into the Datazen publisher application specifically for the Windows 7 environment.

You can find more details and how to download and install the Publisher App here: Datazen Publisher for Windows 7 available now