Clarifying Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, and more
This is episode 125 recorded live at Microsoft Ignite on November 8th, 2019 where John & Jason interview Adam Saxton, Microsoft’s “Guy in a Cube”, about the Power BI community, what announcements Microsoft made this at Microsoft Ignite, and expand upon Adam’s Guy in a Cube Round Up for November 11th.
Killer Power BI updates at MS Ignite (Guy in a Cube Roundup | November 11, 2019)
Weaving Business Intelligence into the fabric of the organization with Microsoft Power BI
This is episode 124 recorded live at Microsoft Ignite on November 4th, 2019 where John & Jason talk about some new blogs posts from John and interview Arun Ulag, General Manager of Power BI Engineering at Microsoft, about all things Power BI, what announcements they’ve made at Microsoft Ignite, and some glimpses into the future.
Show Notes
Embed paginated reports in your own application for your customers (Preview)
Announcing Enterprise Information Management Capabilities in Power BI
This is episode 123 recorded on October 31st, 2019 where John & Jason talk to Anna Chu about Microsoft Ignite. She shares information about the upcoming event including lots of tips & tricks, clarifies some information about the event, and we all make some session picks.
6 More tips and tricks for Microsoft Ignite 2019
Monday at 11:00 AM
James Phillips
The Power Platform (Power BI, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow) represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to unleash organizational creativity and innovation, by arming those closest to your business processes with the tools to analyze and transform them. And unlike past approaches to “low-code” application development and business intelligence, the Power Platform avoids chaotic “application sprawl.” Join James Phillips, CVP, Business Applications Group, to see how IT organizations retain control through an administrative approach that centralizes governance and policy enforcement – offering “guard rails” while empowering business users with intelligence – giving them the best of both worlds. Learn how some of the world’s leading organizations across industries have harnessed the Power Platform to eliminate their application backlogs, enhance insights, improve productivity, and transform their organizations at a pace previously impossible.
Power BI Data modeling fundamentals
Monday at 2:15 PM
Peter Myers, Ayush Rathi, Angela Dobrea
This instructor-led session covers important topics in relation to scalable and well-performing Power BI models. It targets business analysts and IT pros, and provides them with foundational knowledge of Power BI modeling and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) basics. This workshop builds upon these foundations by introducing model design best practices, describing row and filter context, exploring practical uses of the CALCULATE function, and solving real-world business challenges with the Time Intelligence functions and iterator functions. This workshop is suitable for those looking to gain an understanding and appreciation of Power BI modeling and DAX.
Microsoft Power BI: Business intelligence strategy, vision, and roadmap update
Tuesday at 2:15
Amir Netz, Christian Wade, Arun Ulagaratchagan, Sarina Stevens, Tim Depledge
Power BI enables customers and partners to do more with their data. Come to this session and join our business intelligence leadership as we share the latest information about our strategy, vision, and roadmap for Power BI.
Azure Active Directory: New features and roadmap
Tuesday at 9:00 AM
Alex Simons, Melanie Maynes, Sadie Henry, Libby Brown
For anyone working on or looking in to identity and access management in the cloud, come to this can’t-miss session to get updates on Azure Active Directory and our vision and roadmap areas for identity in the next year. You’ll hear about the newest features and experiences that provide seamless access for any identity, protect your organization from breaches, and use the latest open standards.
Shut the door to cybercrime with identity-driven security
Wednesday at 10:15 AM
Mark Morowczynski, Rohini Goyal
Today, in most organizations, there exists an abundance of security solutions and yet what will actually make you secure remains obscure. Come to this session to get your much needed answers on the steps you can quickly take to protect yourself against the most prevalent current and emerging threats!
Office 365 and Microsoft Teams adoption from the real world
Wednesday at 5:35 PM
John Peluso
Oak Ridge National Laboratories is mainly an Office of Science lab and as such, research and collaboration are key to the lab’s success. They had integrated Skype into their environment when it was still Lync, so naturally, end users had utilized it heavily throughout the years. It was then natural to move towards Microsoft Teams when it became available given its additional features, but many challenges stood in their way. While Skype for Business is easy to use because of its simplicity, Teams picks up the slack (no pun intended) from what Skype was missing. Learn how ORNL navigated the many challenges of transforming their team collaboration and created a new model for accomplishing their mission.
Stop doing these four things in SharePoint and start doing them in Azure
Thursday at 3:40 PM
Mark Rackley
For well over a decade now, Microsoft SharePoint has been used as the silver bullet for a multitude of business needs around data, storage, and workflow. However, all too often attempts are made to shoehorn SharePoint into a process that it was never designed for. Developers become frustrated trying to make SharePoint work the way they want and users become frustrated that their business needs aren’t fully met. There is a better way using Microsoft Azure. In this session, learn about four common business scenarios you are probably trying to do in SharePoint today that you could easily move to Azure and get better performance, improved scalability, and even reduce costs.
Making the most of out-of-box approvals in SharePoint Online
Friday at 9:00 AM
Laura Rogers
Do your SharePoint power users create approval processes for documents or forms? The approvals action in Microsoft Flow is an extremely useful and versatile action for these scenarios. The requirements of your workflows may range from simple to complex, and they all vary when it comes to flexibility and functionality. In this session, learn the capabilities of Microsoft Flow approvals, and how to successfully build your various business processes in SharePoint. For example, learn how to build parallel versus serial, one or many approvers, or escalate/reassign approvals when out-of-office.
An introvert’s guide to the IT industry
Tuesday at 2:15
Sonia Cuff
Conferences, co-working spaces and collaboration – today’s tech career essentials or an introvert’s worse nightmare? Come and learn how to effectively navigate social media and in-person networking, while balancing your need for recharging. Explore work tips for both introverts and their extroverted allies, and build a profile where your quiet voice is a super power!
Monday at 5:30 PM
Women in Technology leadership roundtable
Sarah Haase
This diversity session focuses on the unique challenges facing female technology leaders. We share personal stories of success and challenges, discuss the impact of role-based and gender-based stereotypes, and conduct peer mentorship mini-sessions. Whether you’re a woman in technology, an organizational leader/mentor, or an ally that wants to support the growth of gender diversity in the tech space, this session is for you! Learn about the importance of a strong personal brand, gain insight on overcoming obstacles, and see how you can serve as an ally for female technologists.
Wednesday at 11:45 AM
You’re never alone: what community means to people in tech
Magnus Martensson, Susan Hanley, Anna Chu, Laurie Pottmeyer, Sidney Andrews
At a time when we can swipe a touch screen to connect with products, people, and information, what does it mean to be part of a community? What does being part of a community mean to you? Come join panelists from within Microsoft and the MVP community to participate in a conversation about community – what it means, how it helps, and how you can engage.
This is episode 122 recorded on October 29th, 2019 where John & Jason talk about the October Power BI news including refreshing your Power BI dataset using Microsoft Flow, general availability of Automated Machine learning in Power BI, and the Power BI lineage view.
Introducing Power BI lineage view
Announcing Automated Machine learning in Power BI general availability
Announcing new contact lists for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service
Refresh your Power BI dataset using Microsoft Flow
Keep your Power BI SharePoint reports current with Microsoft Flow
Allow Pro Users to Publish RDL files from Report Builder
The current version of the report builder can only be published by premium capacity accounts. It would be awesome to include this feature for pro users as well and allow us to add paginated reports to our apps we develop. We have a flat organizational structure and tend to use power BI for clients. We all have pro licenses but there is not much sense to buy premium capacity at this time. However, having this feature would be a huge benefit to everyone using power bi under pro accounts.
Ability to BLOCK self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products
Message centre update refers : MC193609 Self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products (Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow) will be available for commercial cloud customers starting 11/19.
We need the ability to block this on tenant level with immediate effect. The platform will become ungovernable in a very short period and cause massive governance issues.
This is episode 121 recorded on October 15th, 2019 where John & Jason talk about the October Power BI Desktop features including Automatic page refresh for Direct Query, the new Q&A visual and associated updates, and Query diagnostics.
A PBI report is showing 7*24 hours （Full Screen）. Now the data gateway has been finished the refreshing. But the data on the report is not be changed. Looks like it is a static page. I must manual refresh. So it is not automatic. Hope enable the report to auto refresh.
Develop an item formatting property which allows to set the visibility of a report item when you want to conditionally hide the item based on a report parameter or some other expression that you specify (also DAX expressions).
You can develop this incrementally starting from visuals, then text boxes, then shapes and buttons….
If you want to go the extra mile, you can also develop a functionality that allows the final user to toggle the visibility of report items.
For more information and since it was an available and really useful capability see “Add an Expand or Collapse Action to an Item (Report Builder and SSRS)”.
I double checked in the ideas database and there are many ideas describing the same functionality; this is the reason why I do believe this is really required and will try to collect all the previous votes under this item.
This is episode 120 recorded on October 2nd, 2019 where John & Jason talk about the Microsoft Ignite schedule builder and a whole bunch of news items from the last month.
Power BI Report Server September 2019 Feature Summary
Template apps update (preview) is now available
Paginated Reports in Power BI September 2019 Feature Summary
Power BI Dataflows September 2019 Feature Summary
Announcing the Microsoft Business Applications October Virtual Launch Event
URL parameters for Paginated Reports are now available
What’s new for SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services RC1
What’s new for SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services RC1
The ability to message all Power BI users from the Power BI service
If you run a Power BI platform for a lot of users you should be able to send /push notifications to them. We are currently experiencing high fail rates and it would be great to alert all users that we’re busy looking into it.
Support creating calculation groups in Power BI Desktop
Support the creation of DAX calculation groups in Power BI Desktop – otherwise Power BI can only consume calculation groups created in Analysis Services, whereas it would be very useful to have this feature in any Power BI model.
Even just a simple text window with a script would be fine. You can clean up the UI later.
Thanks.
This is episode 119 recorded on September 27th, 2019 where John & Jason talk through the Microsoft Power Platform 2019 Release Wave 2 Plan and highlight the important Power BI dates over the next few months.
Power Platform Wave 2 Release Plan Document
Connect PBI Desktop to multiple PBI Online Datasets
Currently, once you connect to a Power BI Service/Online Dataset you cannot add additional data sources. We have several datasets we’d like to put in the same report, but can’t because they are over the 1GB limit on size. If we could live-connect to them all in Power BI Desktop this would help.
Images should have Locked Aspect Ratio
When I add an image to Power BI Desktop, the default setting is that the Aspect Ratio is not locked. This makes the process of scaling the image to a suitable size behave in an inconsistent way compared to (say) PowerPoint. If you turn on “lock aspect ratio”, then the image scales correctly and consistently with other office applications.
Most images should be scaled with a locked aspect ratio.
This is episode 118 recorded on September 19th, 2019 where John & Jason walk through the September 2019 Power BI Desktop update, and highlight some important user voice picks.
Disable or prevent Teams from autocreating App Workspace
Please introduce a global setting to Prevent Teams from creating Power BI App Workspace automatically when creating a new Team. As the new Workspaces are detached from Teams/Groups this should be a setting to prevent the App Workspaces being clotted with empty Workspaces from all our Teams.
Comprehensive theme editor is required for Desktop
Report themes are great. For quite some time we have been able to build JSON file that describe themes. At first they were relatively simple, but have evolved to include theming options for virtually every aspect of a report.
The September 2019 edition of Power BI Desktop introduces a massive number of additions to theming. There are now so many that simple, textual JSON file editing is now impractical. We NEED a graphical theme editor.
Power BI Desktop itself could act as the editor with one simple feature addition. Export current visual settings to a theme file (JSON). With that, Desktop could be used to get things “just so” and then save out the JSON for re-use.
This is episode 117 recorded on September 5th, 2019 where John & Jason talk to Chris Webb, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft on the Power BI CAT Team, about Power Query, data consulting, community efforts, and his new shiny new job at Microsoft.
Edit Data Table From Relationship View window
In the current relationship view window we can delete a data table from the model.
It would be nice to right click on the data table and click edit query for the underlying table. This would immediately open up the query editor for data table changes.
Today you have to switch views to the table view, and click edit table. or navigate to the edit queries button and click edit queries. Doing this opens the queries, but you still have to navigate to the table you want to change.
There should be a way embedded into the Power BI Desktop or to the Power BI Service to figure out the actual uncompressed memory footprint.
This doesn’t seem to be rocket science, and would save a lot of headache. It would allow analysts to discover how inefficient their data models are. It would ultimately help the Power BI infrastructure as well by helping people to avoid loading the Power BI servers with unnecessary workload.
This is episode 116 recorded on September 5th, 2019 where John & Jason talk to Marco Russo about Analysis in general, community efforts, and his new book, The Definitive Guide to DAX, 2nd edition.
Marco’s latest book on Amazon – The Definitive Guide to DAX (2nd Edition)
Guy in a Cube Power BI courses – Use the code “bifocal10” for a 10% discount
Power BI Service recognize local time zone for TODAY() and NOW() time intelligence functions
As of now, the reports that I create on desktop utilize a lot of time intelligence functions and relative date filters. This is completely fine so long as I view the report on the desktop. Once I publish the report up to the service and then utilize those visuals in dashboards I run into this issue. All of my time intelligence functions (TODAY & NOW) and relative date filters convert to UTC.
This issue causes my data to roll over to the next day 5 hours early which affects all of my subscriptions.
It would be absolutely fantastic if Power BI service could recognize local time zone or even if we could manually set our time zone so that these measure work correctly.
I would like to have the ability to do a “compare tables” or “compare queries” option.
I understand that there are visuals/queries I can build to compare the DATA within two separate queries but I want to compare the two queries. I want to know how many columns are in TableA versus how many are in TableB and which column names are different from each other. When I have two tables with 150 columns (give or take) and they are allegedly a copy of each other I want to be able to confirm that all 150 in columns in TableA match all 150 columns in TableB and that I don’t have 10 unique columns in each query that just happen to come up to 150.
It would be nice to get a row count difference at the same time, but I do know that I can do the count rows to get that number of each.