Power BI – 2020 August Our Favorites

Hello dear reader! We only need to enjoy these warm days as the summer comes to an end they days become shorter, but isn’t it just WAY TOO HOT? With Power BI 2020 August updates, visualizations come to the forefront with the new images added to the marketplace. Apart from that, there are new collaborations with new resources and some additions to the existing features. You can download the update here.

1-Perspectives support for Personalize visuals

As a refresher, Personalize visuals is a preview feature that will allow your end-users to make tweaks to visualizations in the reading view. For example, your end-user can change a measure or dimension or add a legend. Previously, if you had a large data model, there was no way to pick a more manageable subset fields to not overwhelm your report readers with all fields in the model. Now, in this release we are adding Perspectives support for Personalize visuals, which will allow you to choose a subset of a model that provides a more focused view.

Personalize visuals The hard thing is here for the user to make the correct decision. For this, we will use on of the tools developed for Power BI: Tabular Editor. As well as you can use these tools directly, you can already add them under a tab on Power BI Desktop. You can check the 3rd title here for more details.

You will need to right-click on Perspectives folder to create a new perspective:

Next, you will need to add fields to the perspective. You can do this by opening the Tables folder and right-clicking on the fields you want to show in the perspective:

 

Repeat this for all the fields you want to add to the perspective. Note that you can’t add duplicate fields to a perspective so if you already added it to a perspective you will see the option for that perspective is disabled.

After you have added all the fields be sure to save both in Tabular Editor and then also in Power BI.

                   

2- Rectangular lasso select for data points

Another one of the Power BI August updates is the Rectangular lasso select. We were very happy about the rectangular lasso select. Now it is available for the data points in charts as well. You can select the point in the chart you want with CTRL and filter them. And you can add other points to the point you’ve selected with the Shift key.

3- New Visualizations

  • Progress Bar

  • Pie & Donut Chart

  • Rating Visuals

  • Toggle Switch

  • RoadMap

4- Data Connectivity

Cherwell connector

CSM 10.0 enables real-time collaboration and accelerates incident resolution.

Automation Anywhere connector

Automation Anywhere is a leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform that enables automation of Enterprise business processes. The Power BI connector from Automation Anywhere enables a business user to easily integrate RPA data in their corporate Power BI dashboards without relying on IT resources to create custom integration solutions. The Power BI connecter can retrieve operational, strategic and business metrics from Automation Anywhere’s RPA platform.

Acterys connector

Acterys

 is an integrated platform for Data Warehouse Automation, Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Financial Planning & Analytics (FP&A) for Microsoft Azure, Power BI and Excel.
It enables users to achieve results in minutes, and replace disparate legacy solutions with a single, cost effective and unified platform for all their analytics, planning, forecasting, consolidation and project planning requirements. With the new Acterys Power BI Connector users can now connect to their Acterys environment with one click (without the need to access the database directly or setting up a Power BI dataset) and add the required models to Power BI governed by their Acterys (Active Directory/ Microsoft Account) user rights and audit trails.

So much for this month’s updates. See you in our next article.

Good game, well played.

Power BI : 2020 March Favorites

Hello, here we are with the Power BI March update! I realize how fast the months go by with the new updates. This month, we have some long-waited and nice updates. In this sense, Power BI users’ opinions were taken into consideration. If you have all buckled up, let’s start!

 

1- New Action Alert

The most eye-catching feature in the Power BI March updates! New action options are available for the buttons we add for more interaction and a better application image:

  • Page Navigation
  • Drill through

We tried to find our way with the Page Navigation action to this day: by adding a bookmark with the most unfiltered version of the other page. Microsoft found out that we solved it like the and stepped in and offered this as an action option to do this the legal way. I can spend all my applause on this feature.

 

 

page navigation
Page navigation

 

The second one is one of the actions we wanted to see in the scenes. We were so happy about even the “Right-click to use the drill through.” text! -Because normally we had to go to charts and right-click to find that feature!- That’s why we are extremely happy about it.

tablo detayını gör
Activating the Drill through feature through the “See table details” button.

 

When we choose the Drill through as action, we can print the chosen one with conditional formatting and this helps a lot in terms of having an image that puts people into action. Also, you can write tooltip texts  for when its active/passive.

Koşullu Biçimlendirme&Enabled Tooltip
You can print the selected value by using conditional formatting for the text in the button and make it visible by writing any text you want to the Enabled Tooltip area.

 

Disabled Tooltip
You can write what you want to do into the tooltip field in order to activate the button.

2-Multi-column sort for tables

Feels like it was just yesterday that you were crying “But why? We need this feature!” and I was saying “I know, I know, it is so ridiculous but it is what it is!” And now we finally got this update! To add more columns to the sort order, Shift + click the column header you would like to add next in the sort order.

birden çok sütuna göre sıralama
When you click a column title with the SHIFT key, it accepts that column as sorting measure as well.

3- Dual axis for line chart

It was our subjects in recent trainings! Now we can add a second axis that allows us to draw two trends with different ranges along the same X-axis progression. We can compare two different units in the same graphic at the same time. Like Sales Amount&Sales Total, Sales Tex&Sales Total…

4-Filter Pane Search

It was a feature that was available in web but not in desktop. Now it is available for desktop too. You can search the filter you want in the search area. This features is activates as default. You can turn this feature on or off in the reports settings of the Options dialog.

Filtrelerde arama

5-Updates to decomposition tree

Some people were very happy when the decomposition tree came us default to Power BI! The decomposition tree now supports modifying the maximum bars shown per level. The default is 10 and users can select values between 3-30. Setting a low number is particularly handy if you don’t want the decomposition tree to take up too much space on the canvas. That way it’s more useful.

ayrışma ağacının yeni özelliği

6-New DAX function: COALESCE

A new DAX Function enters our lives with the Power BI March updates. The COALESCE function returns the first expression that does not evaluate to BLANK. So, what the hell does this mean? There are already a lot of functions as “That does not evaluate to BLANK”… They syntax of this function is:

COALESCE(, [, ]…)

 

It goes like that step by step and shows us the non-blank one. As outcome, it returns us a scalar expression. We can use it in an example like that:

When we do a calculated and show in on card, we don’t want the blank expressions to be visible. We want something like 0,1,100,”-“. For this we use the IF(ISBLANK(…) expression. Right at this point we can use this function.

COALESCE (SUM (FactInternetSales [SalesAmount]), 0) = IF(ISBLANK(SUM (FactInternetSales [SalesAmount])),0)

7-Relations get stronger with ArcGIS!

Product of Esri -the most known map and cartography company of the world: ArcGIS. We have been using its maps as default anyways for a long time and knew that more detailed features would come. Most features are available for Premium and some can be used in Pro. First of all, let me show you the location of ArcGIS maps.

ArcGIS
ArcGIS location

When you click here, there are 3 types of connections:

  • ArcGIS Enterprise
  • ArcGIS Online
  • Standart

 

The ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online options are for users who have the premium app subscription and provides all the capabilities of Standard and extra capabilities, including additional geocoding, technical support, and access to mapping reference layers, and more. The Standard option is free and provides basic mapping capabilities. I leave the features below for you to check them.

arcgis maps capacity&preferences

Multiple Reference Layer

All premium app users can now add multiple reference layers to a single map visualization within Power BI. A reference layer is information represented on a map. It adds context to your operational business data. For example, let’s say you have mapped your store locations in Power BI. You can now overlay it against reference layers such as income, age, competitor locations or other demographics to gain valuable insights. You can add data and layers that are published and shared online by the ArcGIS community as well as layers from your ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise organization.

New table of contents

A new table of contents that will help all ArcGIS Maps for Power BI users (free and premium) better visualize their data on a map has been added. Now, when you drag data to a location field well and see it on a map, you can also see a table of contents that lists all the layers on the map and shows the features represented by the layers. This allows your report viewers to quickly understand the data that they are seeing.

arcgis_map

8-Data Sources

Is an update without a new data source an update at all?

  • HIVE LLAP: This connector provides both Import and Direct Query capabilities and the ability to specify Thrift Transport Protocol as ‘Standard’ or ‘HTTP’.
  • Cognite:  The Cognite Power BI connector enables data consumers to read, analyze, and present data from Cognite Data Fusion (CDF).

We have shared our favorite updates for this month. You can click here for our other articles about Power BI. Click here to download the latest version of Power BI Desktop.

Good game well played.

 

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 May Favorites

Hello dear reader! Here we are with the Power BI May updates. Compared to last month, this month’s updates are a bit more superficial. But of course there are some subjects that stand out as always. Let’s go and start analyzing the Power BI May updates right away.

1-Apply All Filters

There is a new button in the filter field. What does this mean? It means that now we have some options while applying filters:

  • The report can change immediately in accordance with the values we choose on the filter field.
  • You can add Apply button to filter headers from the filter field. In this step, you need to press this button after making filter choices.
  • You can ad an Apply button that would apply all the filters at once on the filter field. First you do your filters on all the headers and than press this button.

You can access this new option by going to File > Options and settings > Options > Query reduction.

 

The necessity of it is arguable but to tell the truth, I know that it has been asked if all these new filter pane skills didn’t exist. So it is for sure that their existence will make some happy. By the way with this update we say goodbye to the old filter pane, bye sweetie.

2- Buttons Now Support Fill Images

A feature very convenient for people who want to use different images and shapes instead of writing an expression only. You can put different images to default, on hover, on press, and disabled options. You can access the option where you can use a button for this on the Fill field.

 

buton image

3-Drop Shadow Support for Visuals

I think this is the most prominent one of Power BI May updates. I am really happy to to have shadow effect! It gives dimension to the chart field and thus is very useful. Before, we arranged these shadowed fields on PowerPoint and than brought it to the Power BI background. By the way, there a lot of options like angle, transparency under the Shadow title. Since we don’t have to do this anymore, a wide range of people will be satisfied. ❤

shadow, gölge

4- Conditional Page Navigation

Drill through option that was on preview is now generally available. Not only that, they also added conditional page navigation! This is a huge step. This means that you can show pages based on users! Let’s analyze its details all together. The main logic is that you need to enter the name of the page that will navigated by conditions into the DAX indicator.

5-Feature Table (Preview)

Actually it is one of the most interesting features of this month. Before, you had to download the Excel Analyzer extension to your computer that would run the Power BI data sets you were going to work on. After this step you had to download the data set connection. Now we can find the Power BI Dataset header on Excel. But for now, you have to have all the Office Insider programs to have this feature. I am waiting for the moment when we will be talking about it in detail when it is available for all users!

filtre butonu

6- New Data Source

  • Witivio

Witivio is an enterprise chatbot platform for employees with a deep integration in Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform. Without code, users can design and monitor chatbots for HR, IT HelpDesk and change management. Chatbot admins can track the usage and the performance of their chatbots to build advanced analytics.

You can find this connector in the Online services section of the Get data dialog.

  • Linkar Connector 

Linkar is a suite of components that facilitates efficient connectivity to MultiValue Databases. Linkar SERVER works with almost all MultiValue Database platforms centralizing connections and optimizing DBMS license usage. Client apps use Linkar CLIENT libraries to interact with the database through Linkar SERVER, with bindings for popular languages. This connector allows easy integration with MultiValue Databases through the Linkar platform.

You can find this connector in the Database section of the Get data dialog.

 Webtrends Connector

Webtrends Analytics is a Microsoft-preferred solution built from the ground up for the nuances of measuring performance of your website or SharePoint environments. This connector allows you to import your data into Power BI via our Data Extraction API (REST) with point and click ease. All reports on an individual profile are now available at once; no more limited report lists. The date range options have been expanded to allow standard report periods as well as custom date ranges. A customer account with Webtrends is required to use the connector.

You can find this connector in the Online services section of the Get data dialog.

Planview ProjectPlace connector

Get work done across projects and teams. Projectplace lets you plan, collaborate and track progress of all projects and assignments in an easy and user-friendly way.
This connector is supported by Planview as the preferred method of reporting on ProjectPlace moving forward. Existing users of the ProjectPlace connector should consider rebuilding their reports on this new, Planview maintained, certified connector.

You can find this connector in the Other section of the Get data dialog.

Shortcuts Business Insights connector

The Shortcuts Business Insights connector enables you to consume, read and analyze your data collected via your Shortcuts point of sale product of choice. Gaining access to this data will enable you to realize valuable business insights from your appointment, transactional, client, employee, product, and service data. These insights will allow you to better serve your customers and anticipate their needs, while growing your business to its full potential.

You can find this connector in the Other section of the Get data dialog.

Vessel Insight connector

Vessel Insight is a vessel to shore data infrastructure delivered as a service. The service enables shipowners, operators, and charterers to capture data from onboard systems such as propulsion, navigation, cargo, VDR as well alarm and engine management systems. Vessel Insight aggregates and contextualizes the data before transferring it to the cloud using the KONGSBERG Global Secure Network. The Vessel Insight Power BI connector makes it easy to integrate and combine vessel data with existing systems and streamline reporting and decision making.

You can find this connector in the Other section of the Get data dialog.

Zoho Creator connector

Zoho Creator is a low-code cloud software which lets you create custom applications for your business. Zoho Creator can collect data, automate business processes or workflows, analyze the data in reports, and collaborate with your application users. The Zoho Creator connector allows you to analyze data and share insights based off all data in Zoho Creator, aside from the pivot report.

You can find this connector in the Online services section of the Get data dialog.

 

Power BI may notable updates go like that! You can click here to download this month’s update. You can reach our other articles about Power BI here. 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