Here is the weekly BI-Roundup, and with the release of the April Power BI Desktop update, there are always some new features to explore.

Power BI – April Desktop Update

Reporting

As with the image above there are some additional options for Q&A Explorer, which will enable your end users to be able to explore Q&A with some questions already added into the Power BI Model.

In order to enable this, you can use the new Button feature and select the Q&A button

You can also set additional synonyms for report page details under the page information.

 

 

 

 

A new capability that was added to Power BI was buttons that can now trigger certain events. As an example, if you use the Q&A button this will bring up the Q&A Explorer. There are also a whole host of additional options on how you can format and control the trigger buttons.

As shown above, you now can control the chart line styles for Combo charts, which has been previously enabled for other chart types.

There has also been sort improvements for visuals which is based on the following conditions.

  • If in your visual, it has a Sort-By column configured it will use this by default.
  • If you do not have the Sort-By but have a Date column, it will then sort by the Date column
  • Lastly if you have neither of the above it will sort by the measure descending.

Analytics

What the Linguistic Schema is, is a YAML format in which you can add phrasing, synonyms or customize the language for Q&A. There will be more details going into depth with regards to the linguistic schema.

There is a new DAX funcation called COMBINEDVALUES, and what this does is to enable you to concatenate multiple columns together. Because it is a DAX function it means that this be a measure. As a result when you are using DirectQuery it will be able to better translate this back to the source system.

Likewise, the COMBINEDVALUES function can make it easier to combine multiple values together in a measure format.

Custom Visuals

Organizational Custom Visuals are now generally available.

Overview by CloudScope custom visual

Icon Map by Altius

Hexbin Scatterplot

Data Connectivity

Adobe Analytics Connector is now Generally available

You can now specify a Custom Port when connecting to SAP HANA

There is a new connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central data source.

Here is a link to the actual blog post if you want to get more details: Power BI Desktop April Feature Summary