Even though I think a lot of people took time off over the Christmas period it seems that the Power BI team at Microsoft was full steam ahead.

Which is a great thing to come back to work and have all these updates and new things to look into.

Power BI – Q&A for SSAS Tabular

The reason for me starting with this, is that currently I really enjoy the capabilities that you have when using Q&A within the Power BI service.

My only gripe was that when I am directly connecting to an On-Premise SSAS Tabular database I was not able to use Q&A. And often the On-Premise SSAS Tabular databases are where a significant amount of time and development has been spent getting it with all the required information.

And don’t get me wrong it is great to connect directly and create reports and have real-time queries running.

But in order to really showcase what it is capable of until now I felt that Q&A was the missing piece. And it is great to see that this is something that they have started working on. And I have no doubt that this will be a welcome feature and something that I will put to use as soon as it is available.

You can find out about it here: Add Q&A capability for datasets based on Analysis Services Tabular Models

Power BI – Weekly Service Update

This past week’s update was once again a big update with a whole host of additions.

Once again I am only going to highlight what I think is significant from the list below.

Dashboards

Collaboration

Reports

Connectivity 

Excel Reports

Other

With regards to the Dashboard and Reports section I do think that the ability to export the data is really something that people have been asking for, for a long time. And it does give the report consumer the ability to use and interact if required with the raw data.

How often do we hear the question, can we export this to Excel? Well now we can from Power BI!

Adding the image to Text box as a Widget is another great addition. I think more so, that this now means that there will be the ability going forward for more Widget type of applications to be added into the dashboards. Which can only lead to some really great ideas and implementations on the dashboards.

Printing and knowing the last time a Dashboard tile was refreshed is also very welcome. This gives the users to take the information to a meeting, or to showcase the dashboard. As well as quickly identifying if the data is current and up to date.

Under connectivity it is great to see that you can now connect to Files on SharePoint Team sites. I know in a lot of companies where they utilize SharePoint team sites for all their documentation and related files. And they are often working directly with those files. Now with this capability it means that as soon as the file gets update, within the timeframe the report will be updated also.

Under Excel it is great to see that you can now open and pin the Excel Charts to a dashboard. This is very welcome as often your chart tells a very interesting story and instead of having to try and re-create it, you can use all the hard work that has already been done.

You can read all about it here: Power BI Service Update

Power BI – Lithium Content Pack

Another week another great content pack. This week it is Lithium, which enables brands and customers using social media to get the answers that they need as well as share their experiences. Which in turn leads to more revenue.

You can find out the details about it here: Analyze your Lithium community data in Power BI

Power BI – Mobile App for Windows 10 Mobile

This is without doubt the one mobile app that has taken some time to be released. And whilst I do understand that Microsoft’s direction is Mobile and cloud first and that there are a LOT more users using iPhone and Android devices I thought that they would have gotten this out sooner.

But without doubt it is a welcome addition for people who are using Windows 10 Mobile phones. And it looks to have the same great features as what has currently been released on the other platforms.

I am looking forward to see how this improves over time.

You can find out about the details here: Announcing the Power BI app for Windows 10 Mobile

And you can download it from here: Download from the Windows Store

Azure – Preconfigured SQL Server Virtual Machines

It is great to see that in Azure you can now have some help setting up a preconfigured SQL Server Virtual Machine.

In my mind there is almost no one better to aid with this process. I think they are managing the entire Azure SQL Server, Azure Data warehouse platforms so they will have a vast amount of experience as how best to configure the virtual machine. And I have no doubt that by doing this, they too can make customers get better returns.

You can find out about all the details here: Introducing a simplified configuration experience for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines

Power BI and Leveraging the Cloud

This is a quick plug on a previous blog post that I did this week.

It is just my personal view in terms of how Power BI is leveraging the Azure Cloud platform and how it all fits together. And it is quite interesting how well they have put it all together and how quick it really is.

You can read the blog post here: Power BI and Leveraging the Cloud (Microsoft Azure)