After getting back from the MVP Summit in Bellevue, which was an incredible experience the Power BI team has been extremely busy getting some great new features out the door.

Which means there is quite a lot to cover in this week’s BI-RoundUp.

Power BI – March Desktop Update

Once again, I must repeat what I have said before, the Power BI team has once again released some amazing new features. Which I think is continuing to make Power BI such a compelling and amazing product to not only use, but to show potential customers.

As I do with every month’s update, I will highlight the features which I feel are worth mentioning.

Reporting

Without a doubt the Report Tooltips is a game changer. Not only does it give an almost drill through type of feature, but it is context aware. So, when you enable the tooltip it will take into account all the filters that are being applied and apply that to the tooltip. This allows users to gain more insights without having to navigate to another page.

Bookmarking is now generally available, which means that it is now fully supported. As well as you will no longer need to go into the Preview Features in Power BI desktop to enable the feature.

Additional formatting improvements for this month is for the table and matrix, where you can now modify the display units to show it in a more meaningful way. As well as you can set the precision in terms of decimal points. One thing to note is that it will override the settings that were defined in your model.

You can now turn off the Visual headers for the entire report. This is particularly useful when you want to embed the reports. This will remove the Context Menu’s, the Focus Mode, drill down, and the option to pin the visuals. This could potentially also make the pages a read only style report.

When you are now adding in new visuals into your Power BI report, it will now look at the existing visuals and place it where it thinks it should logically go. This is great if there are already a few visuals where it can save you some time placing the visual where you wanted it to go.

Custom Visuals

There are a whole host of new Custom Visuals which are detailed below.


Mapbox visuals which have a lot of amazing options for viewing maps

User List by CloudScope

Timeline by CloudScope – Similar to a Twitter like feel

KPI Chart by Akvelon

R DataTable

Outliers Detection

Data Insights by MAQ Software

Dumbbell Chart by MAQ Software

Clustering using OPTICS by MAQ Software

Data Connectivity

There have been improvements to the SAP HANA connector.

Both the SAP BW Direct Query and Azure Analysis Services are now generally available.

Other

The error reporting has now been integrated with Windows Error reporting. What this means is that it now will contain more information. You can also view all your previous errors. As well as if you do not have the time to send the error report right away you can send it later.

You can find all the detailed information in the blog post: Power BI Desktop March Feature Summary

Power BI – Share Content with anyone via email

You can now Share your Dashboards, Reports or Apps with any email address including Outlook.com (Live.com, Hotmail.com) and Gmail. This is really great when you have users or organizations that use the public hosted email addresses.

One word of caution, is to ensure that only the people who are required to send emails externally have the requirements. And other people that do not require it, have it disabled.

You can find all the details on how to share here: Share your Power BI content with anyone by email

Power BI – Persistent Filters

One of the time-consuming tasks in the past was, when you went back to a report, if there were multiple slicers and filters, you would have to reset them each and every time you went back to the report.

This is now a thing of the past with persistent filters.

Persistent filters will now remember your Filters, Slicers, Drill downs and sort order for your reports. So, when you go back to the report it will remember them.

This is a great feature and will make the reporting and analytics experience that much more enjoyable and quick to gain the insights you require.

All the details are here: Announcing Persistent Filters in the Power BI Service

Power BI – Mixed Reality App

With the use of the HaloLens and the Mixed Reality App there now is the capability to be able to Pin Power BI reports to physical locations or to have it tagged within the App.

What this means is that if there is a user on the factory floor, they can have a Power BI report pinned into the machine, so without having to look at their phone or open a laptop they can gain insights as they are moving around.

I think that this opens a whole new avenue and the things that you can imagine are almost endless.

The blog post details are here: Power BI for Mixed Reality app now available in Preview

Power BI – Service & Mobile Summary for Feb

Whilst some of the new features have been covered before here is a quick overview.

There is now the facility to automatically install apps.

A new feature that I was not aware of is now additional
Power BI Premium Capacities for P4 and P5, currently only available in West US and Southeast Australia.

Organizational Custom Visuals can now be controlled by the Power BI Admin

The February update to the On-Premise Data Gateway which has the latest Mashup Engine, and can also refresh data sources from both On-Premise and Cloud.

And finally, updates to the mobile app where you can now share from the Mobile App, you can drag your finger across your screen to get the tooltips and improved hyperlinks

All the details are here: Power BI Service and Mobile February Feature Summary

Data & BI Summit in Ireland

The Data & BI Summit in Ireland will be happening from 24 – 26 April 2018.

They have recently announced the keynote speaker John Doyle, Senior Director of Product Marketing on the Cloud & Enterprise team at Microsoft.

This looks to be a great conference and would be well worth attending if you are able to.

All the Summit details are in this blog post: Data & BI Summit announces keynote: The Next Era of Analytics with Microsoft Power BI