Here is my weekly BI-RoundUp and it is great to see that the monthly update for Power BI is here, as well as some other details of the new items.

Power BI – Update for May 2018

As always here are the updates for Power BI

Reporting

As shown above the first item is that you now can have conditional formatting based on another measure.

As well as having the colors for fonts also be on another measure. This means that you could have a color scale on an item for the measure and another set of rules for the Font color.

Along with that when looking for the alternate measure to use, you can search for the measure which is very handy.

There now is an update to Synch slicers where you can now create a group which will you to control how those groups are synced. You can also put slicers from different fields into one group

There have been improvements to the Log axis to make it consistent.

There have also been data label options updates for Funnel charts where you can now get additional options in order to view more label data

You can now also change the stroke width for line charts and combo charts, so that as shown below if you are using markers you can have them appear to be sitting in mid air, but in reality the stroke width is set to zero

Analytics

There has been a great update to the Drill Through feature, where now you have the option to take all the filters on your source page and pass them through to your drill through page. And you easily have the option to decide how you would like it to work.

Not only that you can also use measures as part of the drill through. If you do use measures it will automatically pass through all the filters from your source page.

Power BI Premium

If you have Power BI Premium, you now can use incremental refresh to only refresh your latest data. This is a great improvement in that if you have a large dataset you no longer need to refresh the entire dataset every day. You can easily configure it with a Date/Time Start and End Range. After which in the dialog for the table you can then configure how long you want to store all your data. And then what part of your data you would like to be incrementally refreshed.

Custom Visuals

There is the collage custom visual

And a Chinese Color Map

Data Connectivity

The biggest update is to the Web Connector from Examples, which now allows you to get data from a website that is potentially not stored in a table.

This allows you to type in some text for an item that you are looking for that is repeated, and Power BI will then find that item and extract the data you are looking for. This is insane!

The following connectors have either been created or updated

• Common Data Service for Apps connector (beta)
• Azure KustoDB connector
• Google BigQuery and Azure HDInsight Spark connectors now generally available
• Adobe Analytics connector update – Support for multiple domain logins (preview)
• Visual Studio Team Services connector update – Analytics views support
• OLE DB connector update – Support for alternate Windows credentials
• SAP BW DirectQuery connector updates – Improved technical name support

Data Preparation

There has been an update to the Column from examples where you can now combine values from multiple columns to derive your new column

Here are all the details for the entire blog post: Power BI Desktop May Feature Summary

Excel – Custom Visuals

This is a big change and movement for Excel users. I know that having the option to not only import custom visuals, but to also develop them for a company’s exact requirements is super cool and enables them to view their data with the requirements.

Along with this it also means that there is the capability to create a Custom Visual once which can then be leveraged in Power BI or Excel.

You can read all about it here: Excel announces new data visualization capabilities with Power BI custom visuals

Power BI – Service & Mobile Update

There have been some updates to the Power BI Service with regards to Audit logs are now on by default. Which is great as this can assist with viewing who is using the reports, as well as how they are being used.

The On-Premise Data Gateway now has support in the personal version for Custom data Connectors, which is going to add tremendous value to Power BI.

In the mobile app you can now drill up and drill down. And there is a demo showing how the Power BI Mixed reality app might be applied in an organization.

The blog post details are here: Power BI Service and Mobile April Feature Summary

Power BI – ArcGIS Online & Plus Subscriptions

There now are the two new capabilities using ArcGIS maps.

The first is support for secure reference layers hosted in ArcGIS Online. And the second is the new organizational purchase of Plus subscriptions for ArcGIS Maps for Power BI.

What the above is it allows you to access additional ArcGIS functionality once you have signed in with your ArcGIS account.

If your organization uses an Organizational purchase of ArcGIS this can also be now used within Power BI.

There are a lot more details in the blog post which you can find here: Esri ArcGIS Online and Plus subscription organizational purchase are now available for ArcGIS Maps for Power BI