Episode 146 – May 2020 Power BI Desktop Update
This is episode 146 recorded on May 21, 2020 where John & Jason talk about the May 2020 Power BI Desktop Update including Curate featured tables for Excel coming to preview, Drop shadow support for visuals, Direct Query on Dataflows and Dataset impact analysis. There are also picks this week… finally.
Show Notes
May 2020 Power BI Desktop Update:
- Curate featured tables for Excel (preview)
- Apply all filters (preview)
- Enhancements to change detection (preview)
- Drill through button action is now generally available
- Enhancements to page navigation action
- Buttons now support fill images
- Drop shadow support for visuals
- Filter pane migration
- Packed bubble chart by xViz
- Updates to hierarchy filter by xViz
- Power Apps visual is now compatible with all languages supported in Power BI
- Direct Query on Dataflows
- Web by example now automatically suggests tables by default
- Enhancements to Query Diagnostics: Privacy Level partitions
- Witivio connector
- Linkar connector
- Webtrends connector
- Planview ProjectPlace connector
- Shortcuts Business Insights connector
- Vessel Insights connector
- Zoho Creator connector
User Voice Picks
John
Currently we can categorize a data column as a Web URL, an image URL, barcode and a number of geographic categories. These choices affect how the data is rendered in reports.
What we need is a new category – HTML. Whenever an HTML field is rendered, it could do so using full fidelity HTML in visuals like tables, cards, etc. This would solve a number of needs for things like an HTML visual, hyperlink support in tables etc.
Automatically detect hyperlink in text
We work with a lot of textual data, and much of that data has hyperlinks in it. It would be nice if when rendered, those links could be “live” so that a user could click on it and be taken to the destination. This would match similar behaviour found when writing emails, and across the Office suite.
Jason
Some datasets and analyses are too sensitive to even allow export to PDF, PPT and printing. But at the moment this option is only available to alter at the tenant level. It would be better to have it either at workspace level, or better, at report level in the same way as data exports are set at report level.
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.
Also See: Working with time zones in the Power BI relative time slicer
