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!

https://aka.ms/Aggregations

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.

Episode 111 – July 2019 Power BI Desktop Update

This is episode 111 recorded on August 1st, 2019 where John & Jason talk about the latest update to Power BI Desktop including Icon sets for table and matrix, Aggregations now being generally available with RLS support, and the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 connector.

Show Notes

New look for the Power BI Service now available

PBI Desktop July 2019

New Transform: Split column by positions

User Voice Picks

John

Theme editor

What else to say…

PBI Theme editor is needed to Create new / Edit current theme.

Thank you!

Jason

Custom theme colors for Conditional Formatting dialog box

If you switch to a custom theme, the conditional formatting dialog still shows the default theme colors. It would be nice to have the custom theme colors in the conditional formatting color-pickers.

Episode 110 – All About Ignite with Anna Chu

This is episode 110 recorded on July 25th, 2019 where John & Jason talk to Anna Chu from Microsoft about all of the opportunities available for community participation at this year’s Microsoft Ignite Conference.

Show Notes

Microsoft Ignite 2019

Microsoft Ignite 2019 call for community content

Microsoft Ignite 2019 call for community champions

Microsoft Ignite 2019 call for community reporters

Episode 109 – Interview With Reid Havens

This is episode 109 recorded on July 18th, 2019 where John & Jason review some community news, and John interviews Reid Havens of Havens consulting about the Power BI community, consulting in the Power BI world, and template apps.

Show Notes

Matt Allington’s post on scaling capacity up and down

Phil Seamark’s post on speeding things up if you use “contains” in DAX

Phil Seamark’s post on speeding up DirectQuery

Guy In A Cube – No code REST APIs

User Voice Picks

John

Support AVRO file format

It would be great if Power BI could read files in AVRO format from Azure Blob Storage

Jason

Allow ‘Search’ within slicer filtering for non-text attributes

Text attributes can be ‘searched’ within report slicers. However, integers cannot. For example, if someone wants to quickly find and slice by a Customer Id, it is very cumbersome right now – lots of scrolling. A simple search by Customer Id (as an integer) within the slicer would make it much faster and a better user experience

Episode 108 – Interview with Justyna Lucznik

This is episode 108 recorded on July 12th, 2019 where John & Jason interview Justyna Lucznik, Program Manager on the Microsoft Power BI team, about the Machine Learning abilities in Power BI, the announcements around AI & ML at MBAS and what is still to come.

User Voice Picks

Justyna

Ability to execute R and/or Python scripts on data model data in DAX expressions

Expose a generic function in DAX that takes R/Python script as a parameter to run on data model data. This enables real advanced analytics in Power BI.

Jason

Add labels to Key Influencers

1. Add data labels to Key Influencers so we can see which data points are the outliers.

Currently, the only way to know is to filter categories out, or to do a scatter plot of the 2 variables under consideration. Not practical when having many key influencers.

2. Add color and size options for the graphical view of the influencers, similar to the Scatter Plot visual

-OR-

3. Add the ML capability to show clusters in the data, in addition with the awesome decision tree for the top segments.

John

Machine Learning Models for Pro Users

Please extend Machine Learning capabilities to pro users. Small to Medium sized business may not have the employee count to justify enterprise licenses, but we can still benefit from general capability advancements in the Power BI service/product offering.

Episode 107 – Power BI News and MVP Renewals

This is episode 107 recorded on July 2nd, 2019 where John & Jason talk about MVP Renewals, the World Cup, and a whole bunch of Power BI News including the New Viewer Role for Power BI workspaces, the June dataflows updates, and a new version of Power BI Report Builder.

Show Notes

Power BI Dataflows June 2019 Feature Summary

Announcing the New Viewer Role for Power BI Workspaces

Introducing dataflow templates; A quick and efficient way to build your sales leaderboard and get visibility over your sales pipeline

Avoiding workspace loops by expanding navigation properties in the GetGroupsAsAdmin API

Power BI Paginated Reports June 2019 Feature Update Summary

Announcing support for non-Premium Power BI datasets in Power BI Paginated Report Builder

User Voice Picks

Jason

Power BI Desktop: Option to use either light or dark interface

New Desktop app update installed an almost white user interface. There is zero contrast which is not good for the eyes. I see where some people have requested a light interface so incorporate an option to select either light or dark theme like in the Office apps.

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/37882726-option-to-use-either-light-or-dark-interface

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)”.

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

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/36697297-visibilty-hide-an-item

Episode 106 – A Bearless interview with Chris Finlan

This is episode 106 recorded on June 11th, 2019 at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit where John & Jason talk to Chris Finlan, Senior Program Manager for Power BI at Microsoft, about the recently release features around Paginated Reports in the Power BI Service, Power BI Report Server, and more.

User Voice Picks

John

Allow for simpler account switching between tenants

It is next to impossible to switch between accounts/tenants in the Power BI mobile client. The user must first log out of the existing account/tenant, and then establish a connection with the different tenant. This is a multi-multi step process.

Contrast this with the multi tenant capabilities of the Teams mobile app, or of Outlook, SharePoint etc. We need better account switching in the Power BI mobile app.

Jason

Add an interface in Power BI Reports for browsing shared datasets on the Report Server.

A current capability we use in Power BI Reports on our Power BI Report Server is consuming Shared Datasets that are already on the server. We should have a “Shared Dataset” connector option in Power BI Optimized for Report Server that helps users identify which Shared Dataset are available on the server and the parameters(if any) are required to use the shared dataset. This would be a similar capability that exists in Report Builder when adding shared datasets.

This could be a simple UI that ultimately results in an OData source using the PBI REST API. This would simplify adding shared datasets rather than forcing users to under the REST API. Seems like a low overhead improvement that has high potential

Chris

Paginated reports – please make it available in Pro as well as Premium

Paginated reports – please make it available in Pro as well as Premium .. thank you

Episode 105 – June 2019 Power BI Desktop Update

This is episode 105 recorded on June 13th, 2019 where John & Jason talk about the latest update to Power BI Desktop including the new look for Power BI Desktop, Certified and shared datasets, and Visual level filters for slicers.

Show Notes

MBAS Session are Online – https://community.powerbi.com/t5/MBAS-Gallery/bd-p/MBAS_Gallery?filter=pc_power+bi

Power BI Desktop June 2019 Features

Reporting

Analytics

Modeling

New DAX comparison operator: ==

Visualization

Data connectivity

Data preparation

Improvements to M Intellisense

User Voice Picks

John

Move Measures Between Tables in New Modelling View

The new Modelling View was delivered in Nov 2018 and is fabulous. There is already a button to select all measures in a table – great. I would like to then move all the selected measures to another table, either by drag and drop or by selecting the home table in the properties list (just like you can do for formatting).

Jason

Dark Mode for Power BI

Having a dark mode especially on the creator UI when putting things together would be helpful, similar to other MSFT apps (Azure, Office 2016, etc).

Episode 104 – Power BI Keynote from MBAS

This is episode 104 recorded on June 10th, 2019 live from Microsoft’s Business Applications Summit where John & Jason talk about all of the announcements from the Power BI Vision & Roadmap keynote.