Power BI – 2020 April Favorites

Hello dear reader! We will be talking about Power BI April updates in this post. They expressed these month’s updates by saying “There are a ton of new features”. But now everything will come to the light! I compiled everything below to give you an idea about this.

Personalize Visuals (Preview)

It has been forever since they talked about this feature, they told that it was coming. Turns out that the month in which this feature is presented to the users is this month. We are facing a different feature. Normally the process while creating a report goes like that: Report designer creates the report, certain people that will use it share their ideas, charts, their places etc. get readjusted accordingly and report is opened to the users. Of course after all this process there are people saying “This chart would be better that way,” “I don’t understand anything from this chart, can we change it to a bar chart?” And right at this point this feature steps in running with the hare and hunting with the hounds and says “Well you change it the way you want dear” to those who are not happy with the chart.

Of course for this, this feature has to be activated in report settings in app.powerbi.com. You can also activate it on the power bi desktop application. And as a chart all the ones that the report contained while preparing come as an option. The more interest you don’t just change the chart, you also get to change the fields added to the chart. Thus at the end of the day, users of this report might see something completely different than the report you created in the first place. I think that it will become a need for the report designers to know who used this feature and made changes in the future.

Relative Time Filter

We usually use year and month for filtering in Power BI, and prefer charts for day-based view. Sometimes we want to use filter slogans that we are use in the spoken language: “Last month”, “Last 3 months”, “Next 1 week” etc. These filters are called relative filters. With the update this month, Relative Time filter comes in addition to all these filters. With this we can add hour, minute filters.

relative time filter

Rectangular lasso select across visuals

We have been waiting for such a long time! Where have you been, where?! :'( We shed a lot of tears while creating reports, but finally it is here. Being able to drag everything with mouse on PowerPoint and not being able to choose here… it did offend me I’ll be honest. Pardon my excitement. Now we can choose by pressing control on Power BI Desktop as well. In my opinion this is the best Power BI April update. 😁

rectangular lasso select

Improved discoverability for conditional formatting

You remember how we were looking for visual titles and colors as if we were looking for happiness? They decided to make them visible and put them right next to the related area. That’s it for this feature. 😊

conditional formatting

Conditional formatting for totals and subtotals in table and matrix

Let’s be honest, we do apply conditional formatting and we are pretty fond of it. On the other hand, every single time we would ask questions like: “Why can we not apply it in totals?” We welcome this highly-voted feature this month. If we want, we can apply it to values and totals together or just to totals. Excellent!

Suggest Questions to Q&A

I wrote about the Q&A title in details in this article about updates. In addition to this, they are adding a new feature to the Q&A visual. Now we can suggest questions. We define some recommend titles for the report users when we put a Q&A field to the report.

Measure conditions in Q&A

In the first version of Teach Q&A, we could only use columns. Now there is measure support as well. Now we can use expressions like “Bigger than a certain value” or “Smaller than a certain value” by using measure conditions. Thus, it is more useful.

Change Detection for Page Refresh

This month, a new feature for the automatic page refresh is presented. If you are wondering what the automatic page refresh, you can take a look at this article about updates. It is a practical feature for frequent refresh scenarios. When you set the page refresh as 1 second, even though the data didn’t change, page refreshed continuously and when you think about it, since data change that frequently, it is an inefficient action. For this very reason, they have created a new approach. With the approach, you create a special measure named “Change detection”.

In this measure you choose the calculation method and the field you will watch the change of and frequency. The diamond we see on the left of “Change Detection” tells us that it is Premium only. 😢 You need to add this feature to this field when you turn on the “Page Refresh” feature. Apart from that, this feature can be used only in Direct Query. You can create a measure for each .pbix file. Premium capacity admin must turn this on in the admin portal.

New Visualizations

Radar Chart

I love using Radar Charts. I think they are very practical when it comes to showing strong and weak areas. There are new visualizations concerning this.

Comicgen

An interesting visualization that can be visualized as emotion and pose in accordance with each KPI has been created.

 

So much for Power BI April updates. You can click here to download April updates. I am excited to see what awaits us. Take care.

Good game well played.

Power BI – 2020 July Favoruites

Hello dear reader! This month’s updates are for those who can resist the charm of sea and sand right in the middle of summer. There are two very important features among Power BI July 2020 updates. Let’s go and take a better look right away.

1-   The most important update: Financial Functions on Excel are now on Power BI!

A total number of 49 financial functions are coming to the infrastructure of Power BI. Since we build financial reports on Power BI, it is especially nice to have these functions. These functions added to Power BI have the same function same and syntax as in Excel. You can reach functions and their details here. You can find the names of new functions below.

FINANCIAL FUNCTIONS
ACCRINT CUMIPMT INTRATE PDURATION SLN
ACCRINTM CUMPRINC IPMT PMT SYD
AMORDEGRC DB ISPMT PPMT TBILLEQ
AMORLINC DDB MDURATION PRICE TBILLPRICE
COUPDAYBS DISC NOMINAL PRICEDISC TBILLYIELD
COUPDAYS DOLLARDE NPER PRICEMAT VDB
COUPDAYSNC DOLLARFR ODDFPRICE PV YIELD
COUPNCD DURATION ODDFYIELD RATE YIELDDISC
COUPNUM EFFECT ODDLPRICE RECEIVED YIELDMAT
COUPPCD FV ODDLYIELD RRI

2-Notable Update: Azure Maps visual

Another update we see as important is Azure Maps being included among the defaults images of Power BI.  But, why is it so important? This chart has different  features than the other map charts.

Now we can add extra layers to maps. One of them is “Reference Layer”. With this feature a GeoJSON file containing custom location data can be uploaded and overlaid on the map. This way you can use it as a reference layer containing different information like population and real estate.

Another one is “Custom Tile Layer”. Tile layers allow you to superimpose images on top of Azure Maps base map tiles. What tiles? For example, weather forecast.

Another standing-out thing is that you can see the real-time traffic overlay on the map in your report. If you work in a logistic related area, it will be very useful for you in terms of increasing efficiency.

In order to activate this update, you need to activate Azure Map Visual in Preview Features. Then, when you restart Power BI, you will see it among default images on the right .


3-Update: External Tools ribbon- Preview

External tools are non-Microsoft tools that work with Power BI and that allow you to create calculations and calculation groups and analyze data in terms of performance. The prominent ones are:

  • DAX Studio
  • Tabular Editor
  • ALM Toolkit

These feature cannot be opened on Preview Features. We need to create a folder and set up these programs in that file. The folder shortcut should be:

Program Files (x86)Common FilesMicrosoft SharedPower BI DesktopExternal Tools

You can get details about downloading these tools here.

4- Gradient Legend

You can now see the color scale that have been conditionally formatted by columns and bar charts as a legend. Of course, unless you add a legend on purpose.

5-Global option to disable automatic type detection

Power Query tries to automatically detect column headers and types based on the data. This feature didn’t function on schema-less data sources and we had to fix it manually. Now we can disable automatic type detection against schema-less sources. This new option can be found under the Options dialog under Global > Data Load.

We cannot talk about data sources in Power BI 2020 July updates 😮 We haven’t come across this situation for a while. If you want to see prior Power BI updates or take a look at other Power BI articles on our blog, click here. Till the next time, take care!

Good game well played

Power BI – Our 2020 June Favorites

Hello there dear reader!  As much as the weather has different opinions on this subject, according to the seasons calendar they taught us in the 1st grade,  summer is here! This month even if we write about just one of the updates, it would be enough. What an update! Come on, lets start analyzing Power BI June updates right away.

Without keeping you waiting for too long, here is the superstar of the Power BI June updates:

1- Enhancements to mobile authoring

We always liked the fact that Power BI had mobile authoring. Of course it lacked some stuff. For example the squares were too big. Not being able to change the background, not being able to place, not being able to put objects on top of each other could be a bit of a pain in the neck. We got rid of all of them with just one update! Now, isn’t that amazing?

We don’t have to display expressions with low values in huge areas anymore, we can place them to an empty part of a graph. Thus we obtain a mobile layout fully matched with the design of the report. We can easily find images by their names.

There is one more thing that I am still waiting for:  Images that are not displayed on page view can be displayed on mobile layout. For example I use a slicer on page view but it is not useful on mobile layout. I need another slicer special for mobile layout. I hide these slicers or any image that I will be using behind the other graphs. I wish it was not necessary, but i do believe that it will not be in the near future. 😁

2-Automatic Page Refresh

It was a feature that made Pro users on Premium cry out “Aren’t we gonna have automatic page refresh too?” Finally it is released for Pro as well. Now Pro users too can enjoy instant refresh. To enable this feature you have to connect to a Direct Query source with this method. After that you can see this feature in page properties.

3-Enhancements to Hierarchical Slicer

In February hierarchical slicer was introduced to us. We had some issues since then, like issues with icons and font size. It is indicated that with this month’s update we got a new slicer cleared off these issues completely. Now we have more options for expand/collapse icons. Now we are able to customize indentation for child items -we had too seek it in the space back in the day as you know. Also the icons are scaled with the font size.

 

4-RLS is now supported for Featured Tables in Excel’s Data Types gallery

The matter of connecting to Power BI datasets from Excel is developing rapidly. Now, when you mark a table as featured and then publish to the Power BI service, that table will appear in Excel’s data types gallery even if it has RLS rules applied. Previously, these tables were not shown in Excel. This new enhancement means that users in Excel will only see the rows of data they have access to.

5-Line chart dot formatting options

Sometimes we realized that something was not quiet right, that something was missing in this line chart. But what?  We found the missing point, or shall we say the missing dot. Now we can color the dot corresponding to the related title on the X axis in the line chart. We can do it on the Data colors tab in the formatting pane.

6-Data Connectivity

Palantir Foundry Connector

Palantir Foundry is a platform that reimagines how people use data by removing the barriers between back-end data management and front-end data analysis. Foundry enables users with varying technical ability and deep subject matter expertise to work meaningfully with data. With Foundry, anyone can source, connect, and transform data into any shape they desire, then use it to take action.

This connector will soon be available in the Online services section of the Get data dialog.

 

You can click here to go to the download page of Power BI June updated version. And to take a look at out other articles on Power BI you can click here.

 

Wish you all a great month. Take care!

Good game well played.