With Microsoft Ignite completed I have no doubt that we very soon will see some of the announcements starting to be seen in the Microsoft products.

So here are this week’s updates.

Power BI – What’s coming to Power BI

As you can see from the image above there is a lot of things coming to Power BI in Fall 2016 (Here in Australia our Spring 2016) which means it is just around the corner.

There is quite a lot of information on the image above, so for now I think that I will leave it to you the reader to go through and see what is relevant to you.

Power BI – September Desktop Update

In this month’s Power BI Desktop release I am amazed once again at how many features they have put into the product, as well as made things easier to complete.

As in the past I am going to highlight the sections that I feel are relevant.

Report View

I am really amazed to see how quickly they have not only integrated ArcGIS Maps, but with this they have extended the mapping capability within Power BI to be a real game changer. In the past maps have been sometimes used as a wow factor, but with this update it goes from being a wow factor in certain scenario’s to being a great way to gain insights into your data.

Next is the Mobile Report layout, and you could do something similar in the Power BI Service, but being able to do this within the desktop makes the development experience that much easier and quicker to complete. As well as make sure it will look as you would expect it to on the mobile device.

Analytics

As I alluded to in the previous month’s release that there would be more features being rolled out into the Analytics Pane. And in this month’s release the forecasting feature is something that I am already starting to use. There are some great options as part of the forecast, which will enable you to ensure that you can try and forecast as accurately as possible.

It is also good to see that the Microsoft Power BI team is still investing a lot of time and effort with R. And now that you can use your own R IDE is another great feature, which I am sure will be very welcome to R developers.

Data Connectors

There is a whole host of updates to the data connectors as well as some new data connectors (ProjectPlace & Snowflake Direct Query Support)

Query Editing

Within the Query Editor, they are continuing to not only make it easier to query and transform the data, but now also the ability to view query dependencies.

I also really like the Show Errors experience, as in the past it would add a step into your query transformation and then you would have to go back and delete the step.

As well as other updates and new features, in particular I do like the New Transformation to convert a table to a list. As this list can then be used with the Parameters, so now the list can be dynamically created.

You can read up all about the updates here: Power BI Desktop September Feature Summary

Power BI – Mobile App update for September

It appears that not only has the Microsoft Power BI Team been very busy, but also the Microsoft Power BI Mobile App team also. And in this release they have got some great new features.

The ability to optimize your phone experience with customizable reports, when used in conjunction with Power BI desktop, will make the mobile experience that much better for the people who rely on their mobile platform to view their information on the go.

The addition of the breadcrumb at the top of the mobile app, also is a great feature that will make it that much easier to navigate between reports and dashboards.

It is great to see that Intune MAM is now in the iOS app, as many organizations want to ensure that their data is secure, especially on mobile devices.

Other great updates are the QR for report pages in Android, the ability to manually refresh a tile, and improvements with the data driven alerts.

You can find all the details here: Power BI Mobile Apps feature summary – September 2016

Power BI – How to Optimize your mobile phone experience

This is another great post by the Power BI Mobile app team, where they explain how to optimize your phone experience. They also go into explain how to create the experience using Power BI Desktop, and then also when this version of the report will actually work.

They also go into details to show the enhancements with regards with new capabilities to sort the data in the visuals as well as they have made it easier to drill down into the data. And also in the mobile report view it gives you the ability to still be able to cross-filter.

You can find all the details here: Now in preview: Optimize your phone experience with customizable reports

Power BI – Community Blog Highlights

This is a great area to see the content that other people in the Power BI community have contributed on the Power BI blog. And highlighting what has been released and I have no doubt that it will also help people in their situations.

You can find the details here: Power BI Community blog highlights

Power BI – Installing Power BI Desktop through SCCM

This is a quick mention that if you are using SCCM and you want to keep your users up to date with the latest version there is a blog post from Samuel Lester from Microsoft in how to achieve this.

You can find all the details here: Installing Power BI Desktop through SCCM

Power BI – Support Changes

In terms of how Power BI is supported there are some changes that are happening with regards to new cases being opened. If you are a free user, you will be directed to the Power BI community pages in which the community will be able to assist and help out with issues.

Whilst if you have a paid version of Power BI you can open a case as you currently do.

You can read more here: Growing Power BI Community and changes to how we support our users

Power BI – Help Improve Power BI Survey

If you are looking to help improve Power BI, I would suggest taking the survey, which I have done today and done in the past.

You can find the details here: Help Improve Power BI Desktop