Episode 121 – October 2019 Power BI Desktop Update & News

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.

Show Notes

Reporting

Analytics

Visualizations

Data connectivity

Data Preparation

Template Apps

Other

User Voice Picks

Jason

Auto refresh the report

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.

John

Visibilty (Hide an Item)

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)”.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/report-builder/hide-an-item-report-builder-and-ssrs?view=sql-server-2017

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.

Episode 120 – October 2019 News Roundup

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.

Show Notes

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

User Voice Picks

Jason

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.

John

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.

Episode 119 – Power Platform 2019 Roadmap Wave 2 Plan

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.

Show Notes

Power Platform Wave 2 Release Plan Document

Power Platform Admin Center

Power BI Features Release Dates

User Voice Picks

John

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.

Jason

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.

Episode 118 – September 2019 Power BI Desktop Update

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.

Show Notes

Reporting

Analytics

Visualizations

Data connectivity

Data preparation

Template apps

Other

User Voice Picks

Jason

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.

John

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.

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/31342384-export-current-theme-as-a-json-file
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/35469151-export-theme-as-json-file
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/37762750-theme-editor
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/36193693-disable-or-prevent-teams-from-autocreating-app-wor

Episode 117 – Interview with Chris Webb

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.

User Voice Picks

Jason

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.

John

Memory consumption indicator

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.

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/36932935-edit-data-table-from-relationship-view-window

Episode 116 – Interview with Marco Russo

Image result for marco russo power bi

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.

Show Notes

Marco’s latest book on Amazon – The Definitive Guide to DAX (2nd Edition)

SQL BI site

Marco’s blog

Guy in a Cube Power BI courses – Use the code “bifocal10” for a 10% discount

User Voice picks

John

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.

Jason

Compare two Queries – Columns

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.

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/32123752-power-bi-service-recognize-local-time-zone-for-tod

Episode 115 – August 2019 Power BI Desktop Update and News

This is episode 115 recorded on August 29th, 2019 where John & Jason talk about the latest News, Ignite update & the August Power BI Desktop news including Grouping visuals, Measure support for the Key Influencers Visual, & some new Data Connectivity.

Show Notes

August 2019 Desktop Update

Reporting

Analytics

Visualizations

Data connectivity

Template apps

Announcing custom branding for your organization

User Voice Picks

Linda Busdiecker

Enable experiencing a page, solution or site as a different user, e.g. provide the ability to impersonate a user with fewer rights

As Microsoft increasingly supports tailored experiences, we need the ability to operate as a user with equivalent or fewer credentials, including just not being the person who added information.

For example, a site owner who made updates to a site is seeing Updated Pages (with explicit pages underneath) in the left navigation, but has no rights to remove the navigation and didn’t realize that other people weren’t seeing those pages.

Another case was where the SCA had no issue opening a document with embedded documents, but it would not open for site owners and contributors.

In our on-prem environment, I was able to use a test account and assign it with certain rights to verify that those users were going to get the experience I intended, and I was able to do that with a test account. In the SharePoint Online world, for an out-of-the-box solution I’d need a second licensed account for testing in production.

Checking permissions to a site, list, library or item helps, but just isn’t enough for testing the experience on a page in or in a solution.

A potential way to implement this would be to allow me to click on the name I’m logged in as, and in addition to About Me, Sign Out and Personalize this Page, have an option to impersonate a specific user (who has fewer or equivalent rights to me) or a certain level of rights (equivalent to or less than the rights I have).

Some developers in teams help test each other’s solutions, changing who has what rights, but for those of us who largely work independently, we don’t have that luxury.

Paul Schaeflein

Group queries under fields pane in the same way as in query editor, and able to hide groups from user

In the query editor, queries can be grouped (and sub grouped). However, back to Power BI desktop, under the Fields pane, the queries are listed without grouping. Need to retain the same grouping.
Also, when publish the dataset, need to be able to hide some query groups from the user.

Similar to “Add Folders to organize fields“

Episode 114 – Live from SharePoint Fest Seattle with Chris Finlan

Chris Finlan on BIFocal

This is episode 114 recorded on August 21st, 2019 where John & Jason talk to Chris Finlan, Principal Program Manager for Power BI, about his experience at SPFest, whats new and exciting in Power BI, and some specifics around Paginated Reports in Power BI.

Show Notes

Get Paginated Reports into Power BI Pro – User Voice

Apply to work with the Power BI team

Episode 113 – Summer News Round-Up

This is episode 113 recorded on August 14st, 2019 where John & Jason recap all the news that fit to hear from Summer 2019 like Sending refresh notifications to others, Paginated Reports August 2019 Feature Update, Power BI Premium new capacity settings allow for more control over datasets, and more.

Show Notes

Multiple data source definitions on the On-premises data gateway for the same data source

Sending refresh notifications to others

Gateway Management on Admin Center

Aggregations for petabyte-scale BI is generally available!

Power BI Premium – Know What Your Premium Capacity Can Handle

Announcing the New Filter Experience

Power BI introduces service availability notifications

Introducing the new look for Power BI Service

Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise BI Platforms

New Power BI Region in South Africa!

Power BI Developer community June & July update

Paginated Reports August 2019 Feature Update – Report Builder Update, SaaS embedding support and what’s coming soon

Help improve Power BI – Copy vs. Export Survey

Connecting Azure Analysis Services to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Power BI Premium new capacity settings allow for more control over datasets

Access on-prem Report Server from your Power BI Mobile app with Azure Active Directory Application Proxy

Power BI Service and Mobile July 2019 feature summary

User Voice Picks

Jason

Pass SSO user credentials through the Power BI gateway

We need the user SSO credentials to be passed through Gateway connections to Denodo Data Virtualisation layer to be able to securely federate our data/analytics report queries

John

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.

Episode 112 – Changing the Laws of Physics with Christian Wade

This is episode 112 recorded on August 7st, 2019 where John & Jason talk to Christian Wade, Senior Program Manager for Analysis Services at Microsoft, about Power BI in the Enterprise, the updates to Aggregations feature, upcoming major performance enhancements, and more.

User Voice Picks

Jason

Customize visible items in new filter experience

The standard slicers have now a visual level filter, but the new filter experience does not have a similar feature. A correspondent “visual level filter” allowing to define conditions that make an item visible or not. in the new filter experience. The reasons are the same that justified visual level filter in standard slicers.

John

Hyperlink in Visuals

You should be able to insert a hyperlink field into a visual so when a user selects on the visual, it can take them to the desired page.