Welcome to another week of my Power BI Round Up. And as expected there is another massive Power BI Desktop Update.

Power BI – September Update for Power BI Desktop

As always I am going to over the new features and highlight what I think is really relevant in terms of what has been released.

Reporting

With the added support for categorical fields on the X-Axis this now makes the scatter charts more flexible.

As shown above there now is the capability to be able to copy a single value, which will copy the value in its unformatted form, which could be used to put into a search of another application.

Whilst when using the Copy selection feature, it will copy everything that you have highlighted in your table or matrix. And when pasting this, it will keep the column headers as well as the formatting options which you can then paste into Excel or another program. This is really a great piece of functionality which makes it easier when certain data needs to be copied into another system.

There are now some built in report theme’s which are great for those people who just want to move from the default colours, but do not want to create their own custom themes.

Report Page Tooltips are now generally available meaning that you will not have to enable it as a preview feature.

Along with that as shown above there is now report page tooltips available for Cards.

There have also been additional improvements for accessibility in the formatting pane, making it easier to navigate, as well as when using the screen reader there is more support.

Analytics

This is a really big, BIG one having the ability to have aggregated tables in your data model. What this means is that you can have a highly aggregated table of your data which might answer 60 – 70% of the queries. When the queries are run they will use the data in the aggregated table, which in turn results in exceptionally super-fast query response times. And if it does not hit the aggregated table it will then go down to the source table, which could be imported or using Direct Query mode, which means then that the entire data model is actually very small but very fast.

There is a lot more to this, so I suggest reading up the documentation that is included in the blog post. But this is something that I have been waiting for and cannot wait to try it out and get it working.

Finally there is now support for RLS with Q&A, this means if you have had a dataset that has had Row Level Security (RLS) previously you could not use Q&A. This has now been fixed and Q&A is available which is awesome.

Data Connectivity

As shown above there is a new connector where you can connect to PDF files and it will attempt to extract table data from your PDF files.

There is now support for the SAP BW Connector measure properties

There is a new connector called dataflows which will soon be in limited preview which will allow users to connect to an existing data flow.

Data Preparation

As per my first image, and above, there is now Intellisense when going into the Advanced Editor in the Power Query Editor. This is so awesome. There have been so many times in the past when I have not known which M function to use. As well as having syntax errors, and a lot of that pain is now gone with having Intellisense.

The add columns from examples now supports text padding your data, as shown above you can pad the text with zeros for data where you want them all to have the same length.

It is interesting to see that right at the end of the blog post they highlighted that they are working on being able to copy visuals between PBIX files. How cool is that??

You can find all the blog post details here: Power BI Desktop September 2018 Feature Summary

Power BI – Dashboard Comments

This was announced at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit and it is great to see that you now can add comments to Power BI Dashboards, as well as individual tiles on the dashboard.

It is also great that you can tag people in the comments, which will then send an email or send a push notification to the Power BI Android and IOS Mobile App.

At the end of the blog post, they also indicated that this will be coming to the reports, so stay tuned.

You can find all the details here: Announcing Dashboard Comments in Power BI: Your new hub to discuss data and collaborate with others

Power BI – Community Contribution to the PowerShell Cmdlets

This is the first contribution from the Power BI Community which adds to the existing Power BI PowerShell management cmdlets. Where Kenichiro Nakamura has added functionality to work with datasets, tables and columns.

You can find a lot more detail in the blog post: Celebrating our first community contribution to the Power BI management cmdlets

Power BI – PowerShell Cmdlets available in Azure Cloud Shell

What this means is you can now use the Azure Cloud Shell to run the Power BI PowerShell Cmdlets. This also means that there is no need to try install and configure the required PowerShell modules, because this is all maintained in the Azure Cloud Shell.

I would suggest looking into the storage options because depending on how much storage you need, if you have an existing Azure Subscription this could be a very good option.

You can find more details on how the Azure Cloud Shell works, as well as the blog post details here: Power BI Management cmdlets in Azure Cloud Shell