I cannot believe that 2017 is already where and straight out of the blocks we have already got some new features and changes to play with.

So let’s get into it and I have a feeling that this is the year that Power BI is going to dominate and become one of the leaders in the Self Service Data Analytics area.

Power BI – January Desktop Release

It is great to see that the Microsoft Power BI team, has changed the release cycle to be releasing earlier in the month.

In terms of the updates it is great to see that they have once again made some more headway with regards to the table header wrap and more on the table & matrix conditional formatting. I am confident that at some point Power BI will get to be in a similar position in terms of tables and matrix as you can do in Excel.

The new aggregations for the string and Date Time columns is really good and makes it really easy to use these now, especially with the Earliest and Latest.

As well as now Phone Reports going into General Availability so it is now available for everyone.

In terms of Data Connectivity there is a new connector for Visual Studio Team Services and an Enhanced SQL Server Connector that supports SQL Failover option.

And then finally in the Query Editor the capability to extract values from a nested list.

You can find the blog post here: Power BI Desktop January Feature Summary

Power BI – Featured Data Stories

IT is great to see how many people are submitting data stories and as you can see there is a great Sales Scorecard that was featured.

You can view this blog post showing all the data stories: Congratulations to this month’s Featured Data Stories Gallery submissions

Power BI – Mobile Phone Reports Generally Available

Whilst the option to have Mobile Phone Reports has been there, it has not been generally available until now.

This is really great to see that you have the option to create it within Power BI Desktop and ensure that when the users view the reports on their mobile phone, without the mobile app, they will get to see a consistent experience.

You can find the blog post details here: Power BI mobile phone reports now available everywhere

Power BI – Embed Power BI Report into Salesforce

This is a blog post from the Microsoft Power BI blog, in which Catalin goes through all the steps on how to configure this for your own Salesforce data.

Here is the link to the blog post: Embedding a Power BI report into Salesforce

Power BI – Auditing & Assign Pro Licenses with PowerShell

This is a blog post as well as a video with how to implement and get the Audit Logs from Power BI.

As well as to assign Power BI Pro Licenses using PowerShell.

You can find the blog post here: Using Power BI Audit Log and PowerShell to assign Power BI Pro licenses