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

• Grouping visuals
• Filter pane auto-update
• Icon style picker for Icons conditional formatting
• Conditional formatting warnings

Analytics

• Key influencers improvements
  • Measure support
  • General availability

Visualizations

• xViz visualization suite by Visual BI
• Multiple Axis chart
• Marimekko chart
• Variance chart
• Horizon chart

Data connectivity

• Support for SAP HANA HDI Containers
• Edit SAP variables in Power BI Service (preview)
• PostgreSQL DirectQuery (beta)
• MarkLogic connector now generally available
• New Power Platform category within Get Data

Template apps

• Facebook Pages – Basic Analytics

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“