Well a lot has happened in the last week, with the desktop release (YAY!), and a whole host of other details.

Read below for more details on what has been updated and from my perspective.

Power BI Desktop Release for Feb

Every month the awesome people on the Power BI Team release new features and this month is no different!

Reporting

There have been updates to the Filter pane where you now can change the font, the size of the fonts and the colours, which is great to give it a more personal feel.


There have also been accessibility improvements to the filter pane where you can use the keyboard or the screen reader. It is great to see that there are features for people who struggle when using a computer.

You can now also cross-highlight on a single point in a line chart. In the past it you could not do it on a single point, it would be the entire line chart or nothing. This is another great feature.

Now you can now word wrap title cards.


Another great improvement has been made where you can now change the default behaviour of how you want the visual interaction to work.

The default is currently cross highlighting, with the details below you can change it to cross filtering. Which I personally prefer.

I used to have to manually use lines to add borders to my reports, because I wanted the rounded borders.

Now this is an option when you enable the border, that is so cool!


Analytics

One of the major new additions is the Key Influencers visual which is still in preview, is Power BI’s first AI visual.

What this visual allows you to do is to put in what you want to Analyze, and then which columns you want it to be explained by

This is the first version and I think it is awesome. Not only that all the AI is built into the Visual so it does not need to connect to the internet to do any processing.

There are now additional insights when you are using Q&A to try and help you understand your data better.

Along with this, Q&A will now auto suggest questions for you, which sometimes could lead you down a different path you had not thought of before.

There have been improvements to the Python and R script editor which now has intellisense, line numbers and syntax highlighting!

Custom Visuals

This month there are a whole host of custom visuals which also showcase how you can make additional purchases once you have downloaded the free visual.

I am not going to go over all the custom visuals, you can have a look at them in the blog post.

Data Connectivity

Part of the program is now to have Certified data connectors and the following data connectors were added

  • Guidanz’ BI Connector for OBIEE
  • MarkLogic
  • Kronos’ Workforce Dimensions

Below is a list of the new connectors with a brief explanation

  • Microsoft Graph Security – Gives you a view of security and risk across your enterprise
  • Guidanz’ BI Connector for OBIEE – This allows you to get data from OBIEE into Power BI
  • MarkLogic – It enables you to get data from their NoSQL database
  • Kronos Workforce Dimensions – Getting data from the Kronos D5™ platform, Workforce Dimensions™
  • SurveyMonkey – All the survey’s you have had in the past you can now extract
  • Qubole Presto – Getting data out of their distributed ANSI SQL Engine
  • Quick Base – Leveraging data out of Quick Base
  • Sagra Emigo – Getting data for sales organizations and field management teams

Other

And finally, improved error messages for Live Connect & Direct Query connections

Another massive update and if you want to watch the video or read through the blog post here is the link: Power BI Desktop February 2019 Feature Summary

Microsoft the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant

As you can see from above Microsoft is now both a leader and visionary from Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for Analytics & BI platforms

More details can be found here: Microsoft a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms for 12 consecutive years

Power BI Service & Mobile Update for Jan 2019

This blog post covers all the updates that were made to the Power BI Service and the mobile platform.

Below is a link where you can find all the details, as well as a link to more details.

I have covered this in the past, so no need to re-iterate what I have spoken about before.

The entire blog is available here: Power BI Service and Mobile January 2019 Feature Summary

Petabyte – Scale with Power BI & Azure

This blog post highlights the different aspects that you can use in Power BI and complement with Azure to enable petabyte scale within your data assets.

It includes details around Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 and more.

There is also a great video explaining how this has helped Heathrow Airport

The blog post details can be found here: Petabyte-scale Analytics with Power BI and Azure

Incremental refreshing & Query Folding

When using incremental refreshing, it can only be achieved on certain source systems where it can fold the query back to the source system.

This blog post highlights that in the Feb 2019 version of Power BI desktop there now is a warning giving you an indication if Incremental refresh is possible.

This will help people who are configuring Incremental refresh and might not see it running any quicker.

Details can be found here: Incremental refresh & query folding

Webinar on the Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics App

There will be a webinar on 07 March at 12pm PST in which Swati Gupta will show the App as well as answer questions.

Details can be found here: Webinar 3/7: Tour of the new Power BI Premium Capacity metrics app by Swati Gupta