Here is my weekly BI-RoundUp, and as I thought when I started putting this together yesterday that there would be a release of Power BI Desktop, which there is and not only that an updated App Workspace experience!

Enjoy the read!

Power BI – Desktop Release for August

Well that was pretty quick to get another release of Power BI Desktop. And I am sure that the release of Power BI Desktop will go back to the normal cadence of the first week of the month. With that being said let’s get into this month’s updates.

Reporting

You can now export your report pages to PDF currently only in Power BI Desktop. The Export to PDF will only export the visible pages. Currently wall papers or background images are currently not supported. This is some great functionality for those people who want to take the contents of a report and email it, or possibly print it out for a meeting or for customers.

Bookmark groups are now available, which allows you to group specific bookmarks together into a logical area. It is easy to create and allows you to group it based on your requirements such as organisational bookmarks or specific bookmarks relating to a certain subject. You can start from a bookmark group which will only play the bookmarks in that group. By starting with the default view, it will play through all the bookmarks.

Theming is now generally available, so you no longer have to enable it in the Preview Settings.

Using the List Slicer, there is now an option to Filter restatement which is similar to the restatement in the drop-down slicer.

Analytics

You can now use conditional formatting by values. What this means is that if your value has got the name of a colour or a HEX code the background color or font color can be formatted to use the values in that column. This means that you can use any color you need based on your data. Not only that but you do not have to manually add each color. The colors can be part of your dataset or DAX measure.

If you use Python scripts, this is now available in Power BI. You can import your script in the Power Query Editor and then use Python visuals in your reports. Whilst the visuals will render, and change based on other visuals in your report, currently the Python visual is NOT interactive.

Q&A is now generally available which means that you do not have to go and enable it in the Preview settings. There has also been an update to the matching experience in Power BI Desktop and Power BI Premium which will allow for better results when using Q&A

Modeling

You can now add data categories for measures in the form of Image or Web URLs. This will allow you to create a dynamic URL that can then be used to go through to another Power BI report with the filter applied within the URL.

The really exciting part of using a measure with a Web URL is that it will you will be able to render SVG images as shown above, based on your data and show it as sparklines or bar charts.

As shown above there are a whole host of new DAX Statistical functions.

There are a whole lot of new and interesting Custom Visuals which are part of the blog post.

The Spark connector is now Generally available.

A sneak peak of what is coming next month is having the expand and collapse buttons for tables and matrix. And updates to the scatter chart visual which will have the ability to use the categorical axis

All the details can be found here: Power BI Desktop August 2018 Feature Summary

Power BI – New App Workspace Experience

This blog post from the Power BI Team has got a lot of content, so I am going to highlight some of the new features in the new App Workspace Experience.

• No longer will it rely of Office 365 Groups for the creation of an App Workspace.
• You will be able to manage access from security groups, distribution lists and multiple existing Office 365 Groups.
• New additional roles to manage access and permissions to the App Workspace.
  • Admin Role, Member Role, Contributor Role and Viewer Role
• New Admin API which will give all the details of the new App Workspace details.
• Associate a workspace to a OneDrive for Business

It is interesting to note that the new App Workspaces will not be brining across Content Packs. With that being said the Power BI Team is still working to bring across the full parity from Content Packs to Apps.

There also will be a migration plan to migrate all existing App Workspaces to the new App Workspaces which will be available at General Availability.

The detailed blog post can be found here: Enable your team with new workspace experiences (preview)

Power BI – Power BI World Tour

The Power BI World Tour will be coming to a city near you. Please see the link below with more details on which cities it will be happening in, as well as other event details.

I am very fortunate to be attending the Power BI World Tour in Sydney where I will be presenting 2 sessions Common Power BI Challenges and How to Overcome Them and My Power BI Report Has Hit The Size Limit, Now What?

I attended last year, and it was a great event, so if you can make it I would highly recommend it.

Here is the link to more details: 2018 Power BI World Tour – Powered by Your Local User Group

Analysis Services – White Paper for AS Scalability

To be honest I have already this white paper which is only 11 pages long, but it contains a lot of really useful and insightful information.

I always enjoy reading these white papers and I always learn something new. And this time it was to sort the dimensional tables by Surrogate Key (SK) to ensure that the engine will use Value Encoding.

I suggest reading through this because the same engine is used in Power BI Desktop, so you can apply the same techniques to your Power BI Model.

The White Paper Link is here: Whitepaper on modeling for AS tabular scalability