Here is my weekly BI-RoundUp, and once again the awesome people from the Microsoft Power BI Team have released some additional gifts.

Power BI Desktop June Update

Here is another month of big updates to the Power BI Desktop.

Reporting

The first item is now based on your contrast settings, this will be applied to the Power BI Desktop file and in the Power BI Service. The only thing to make note of is that currently background images are not supported in high contrast mode.

There is now also more control for the Donut visual in terms of how wide or skinny the donut will be.

Along with this, there is now more control for the Pie and Donut charts with regards to the label positions in terms of where they will be positioned.

As with the line and bar visuals where you can format the measure labels, this now is also available for the Combo charts, which means that you can now format them individually for better control in terms of how they are viewed.

And finally, they have added more rows when configuring the Mobile Phone reports. It has gone from being 20 rows long to 40 rows long.

Custom Visuals

There is now a new Organizational Chart which can be used to view your data.

There is a new China Heat Map visual which will allow to view your data in China with a heatmap

Modeling

As shown in the initial image, there now is the ability to sort, and filter your data in the data view. This is a great improvement and something that I have already been using quite a bit.

It is also good to see that it has very similar functionality in terms of what you get in the Power Query Editor, where you can not only select the items, but search for items as well as advanced filters based on the data type.

If you have a different locale, there is now improved support for locale in both the Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service.

Data Connectivity

There has been a lot of work put into the SAP BusinessWarehouse connector, where there have been improvements to the following:

  • Improved performance
  • Ability to retrieve several million rows of data, and fine tuning through the batch size parameter
  • Ability to switch execution modes
  • Support for compressed mode, which is especially beneficial for high-latency connections or large datasets
  • Improved detection of Date variables
  • [Experimental] Expose Date (ABAP type DATS) and Time (ABAP type TIMS) dimensions as dates and times respectively, instead of text values.
  • Better exception handling, so errors that occur in SAP BAPI calls are now surfaced.
  • Column folding in BasXml and BasXmlGzip modes. For example, if the generated MDX query retrieves 40 columns but the current selection only needs 10, this request will be passed onto the server to retrieve a smaller dataset.

The Spark connector now supports Windows Authentication

There has also been a lot of updates to the OData V4 connector, where it has improved support for complex data types. There is also now Open type navigation which supports extra navigation properties. Improved support for Custom URLs. Significant performance improvements. And greater resilience when loading data, where it will first try query folding, and if that fails it will then try with less query folding until it succeeds.

On the ODBC connector there has been improvements where if your underlying data source supports the TOP operator, it will then fold that down to the data source. As well as if the underlying DSN connects to a catalog, this will be shown in the Power Query Editor, so that you can select the required catalog.

And finally, there is an update if your account has been provisioned in more than one National Cloud, when signing up you can select which cloud you want to use.

All the blog post details, as well as the video by Amanda can be found here: Power BI Desktop June Feature Summary

Power BI – Subscribe others to Email Subscription

You now can subscribe other users in your organization to email subscriptions, so that they do not have to do it themselves.

I know this is something that I personally have been waiting for and so happy that it is finally here!

The only thing to note is that if your Reports or Dashboards are in a standard App Workspace, you can only subscribe other users who have a Power BI Pro license.

Whilst if your reports or dashboards are in a Premium Workspace, you can the subscribe any users, security groups or distributions lists regardless of whether the user is a Pro user or not. This is because in a Premium App Workspace you can share your reports with a free or pro Power BI User.

All the details on the blog post are here: Subscribe others to email subscriptions in Power BI

Power BI – Developer Community Update

You can now set the background colour when you embed your Power BI Application into an application, where there is extra space.

Now when you load your Power BI report in an application you have the option to load it on a specific Bookmark, so that the users can see the report in the bookmarked state.

There is now an easier and faster experience to set up and embedding environment for Power BI Embedded. This process now means that you can create the Application and upload a PBIX directly as part of the embedding creation.

And finally, there is a new Sample Application from Ted Pattison, which is on GitHub and shows the basics to embed a report. This is something that I am certainly going to look into (when I get a gap).

You can find the blog post details here: Power BI Developer Community May Update

Power BI – Mobile & Service Update

PIC

As you can see below there have been a lot of updates to the Power BI Mobile App and Service, which have already been covered in previous blog posts by Microsoft. Here is the list below, with hyperlinks if you want to get more details.

The only one that was new to me was the updated workflow invite for B2B reports, which is great to see that the experience is easier to complete.