Welcome back to another Power BI RoundUp!

It has been a fair while and to be honest I have been extremely busy with a client planning for and looking on how to best leverage Power BI for their reporting requirements.

Let’s get started with the latest updates.

Power BI Desktop May 2019

Another month has come and gone and there has been another incredible update in Power BI Desktop.

As always below are the items that I want to specifically highlight.

Reporting

As shown in the image above is the performance analyser.

This is something that will add tremendous value when working on Power BI reports and they are running slowly. It will enable you to diagnose and see where the bottleneck is.

There have already been a few video’s and blog posts on how to use this, I know it is something I will be using going forward.

There have been a lot of filter pane improvements:

  • Ability to customize the sort of the filter cards
    • As well as sort A-Z or Z-A
  • Theming support

There have been updates for keyboard navigation for matrix and tables, which can be seen below with the highlighted blue box

Line data label positions have also had an update to allow for the labels to not confuse the report consumers

And finally, under reporting is the ability to change the visual KPI indicator text control

Analytics

The Key Influencer has had the following updates:

  • Binning support for numerical columns.
  • Additional formatting options for colours
  • Mobile support so you can now view it on your mobile device.

Modeling

A very welcome addition is the ability to disable the auto-date tables for new reports. This often makes the dataset very large if you have got a lot of datetime or date columns in your dataset.

The ALLSELECTED Dax function now allows for multiple arguments, just like the ALL function

Visuals

There has been a lot of visuals updated, I would recommend reading through the blog post for all the visual updates.

Data Connectivity

There has been updates to the Essbase connector to support native query for MDX

As well as the following new connectors

  • Intune Data Warehouse connector
  • Tenforce connector
  • Roamler connector

Other

And finally, there is now the automatic cancellation of queries based on the following conditions below.

This is great because it allows for faster reports.

The entire blog post and video can be found here: Power BI Desktop May 2019 Feature Summary

Custom Navigation for Power BI Apps

As you can see above, this is really fantastic to enhance the current App experience in the Power BI Service.

Some of the highlights of the changes are:

  • New Setup Experience
    • You can put in your own logo
    • Change the color theme
    • URL Support for your end users if required.
  • New Navigation builder
    • Re-Ordering of items
    • Hiding Items
    • Grouping related items into a folder like structure
    • Adding links
  • Experience for App Consumers
    • Viewing new navigation experience
    • New App Information Pane with more details of the App and links to the support URL

You can find all the awesome details here: Designing custom navigation for Power BI apps is now available

Power BI Report Server May 2019

There has been an update to the Power BI Report Server as promised in May 2019

This includes all the previous Power BI Desktop updates that have been released, including May 2019

If you want to see what those are please read the blog post here: Power BI Report Server May 2019 Feature Summary

Meet the community stars at MBAS

If you are attending the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS) at the start of June 2019, you will also have the opportunity to meet the community stars who help the community.

I too will be there attending and hope to see you there.

Click on the link to see all the other community stars that will be there: Meet Community stars at Microsoft Business Applications Summit!

SQL Server 2019 SSAS CTP 3.0

There has been a new release of SQL Server 2019 and in this release the following updates have been released

  • Dynamic Formatting strings using calculation groups!
  • MDX Support for calculation groups.
    • This allows for Excel to connect and use the calculation groups.
  • Tooling is currently still limited to Tabular Editor or TOM or TMSL
  • New Compatibility Level 1470

All the details can be found here: What’s new for SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services CTP 3.0

Trusted 3rd Party Connectors

There is now a mechanism to be able to trust and use 3rd party connectors in Power BI

The blog post details how to get this done for developers and end users

The details can be found here: Trusted Third Party Connectors for Power BI