Another week has flown by and there are once again more Power BI Updates, which I really enjoy. But at the same time there is so much content and blog posts that at times it is a bit of a struggle to keep up with what everyone is doing. And with all of that I am still really enjoying being in this space.

Power BI – Dashboard Theming

As you can see in the image above, you now can theme your dashboard. I think the key difference here is that even though you could theme your report there was no parity between the dashboard and the reports.

Well now this is no longer the challenge. Not only can you select default themes or colouring, but you can also customize different areas of the dashboard. As well as put in a background image, which could even be a GIF!

All the blog post details are here: Announcing Dashboard Theming in the Power BI Service

Power BI – Incremental Refresh

As you can see above there is a blog post with a video from Guy in a Cube in which he talks to Christian Wade and how incremental refresh works.

I highly recommend if you are looking to use incremental refresh to watch the video. They go into some detail about how to configure and use incremental refresh.

Not only that but in the blog post they announce some upcoming features,

  • The first of which I am very excited about incremental refresh in the shared capacity.
  • There were also be the functionality to update the meta data for your data which will not invoke a full refresh of the data.
  • Increased data sizes based on your capacity size.
  • Override the effective date, which means that you could set it to another date, especially if your data is loaded at a later time and not every day.
  • XMLA end points will be enabled, which means that you can connect to your Power BI Incremental refresh dataset with SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) which will enable you to do things you can currently do with Azure Analysis Services or SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) Tabular 2017. For example, run scripts to refresh certain partitions.

You can find all the details here: Incremental refresh in Power BI Premium