Episode 217 – Power BI 2021 Year in Review

This is episode 217 recorded on December 23rd, 2021 where John & Jason do a year in review for all things Power BI in 2021, review their wins & losses with their 2021 predictions, and prognosticate about what they see happening in 2022. This is a long one!
Show Notes
Predictions:
2021 Predictions
John
- Return of Live events – Partial Win
- Continued triple digit growth for Power BI – Win
- AAS vs PBI Premium roadmap will be clear – Partial Win
- Web based query and model editor – LOSS
- PPU included in some sort of Office SKU – LOSS
- New simplified editor for paginated reports based on PBUI datasets – LOSS
Jason
- PBI Premium becomes *the way* thanks to PPU – WIN
- Power Query will get a facelift to align with the new Power BI Desktop look and feel – LOSS
- The SharePoint / Power BI experience will not dramatically change in 2021 – WIN
- Creator experience starts the shift to online first, Power BI Desktop secondary – LOSS
- A new player in the events space will emerge to fill the void that PASS Summit will leave – LOSS
- Power Apps & Power BI integration gets better – LOSS
- The Power BI Creator ALM experience will get better – LOSS
2022 Predictions
Jason
- Creator experience starts the shift to online first, Power BI Desktop secondary
- Azure Synapse will continue to grow brand awareness and the Power BI brand will start to take more of a backseat
- The SharePoint Online Power BI v2.0 connector stays Beta for all of 2022
- Power BI continues it’s love affair with Microsoft Teams & Excel
- Power BI will finally get integration with Azure DevOps/GitHub
- Microsoft Ignite Spring 2022 will be another disappointment
John
- Clear return of In Person events – Microsoft events in the last half of the year
- Power Query gets a standalone client with multiple output types
- Deprecation of Azure Analysis Services
- Some sort of licensing that includes both Power BI and Synapse
- Web based dataset editor
- Quick Create report experience for Synapse
- New name for metamodels
Features
January
Announcing the general availability of read/write XMLA endpoints in Power BI Premium
Quickly create reports in the Power BI service (preview)
Announcing Datasets Hub (preview) to explore and analyze your business data
February
March
Announcing Power BI Premium Per User general availability and autoscale preview for Gen2
The new Power BI embedded analytics playground
External Tools integration in Desktop generally available
Power BI as a superset of Azure Analysis Services
April
Power BI Premium per user now generally available for purchase
Episode 188: Community! Community! Community! with Heather Newman
Small multiples: padding controls and combo chart support
Microsoft Charticulator visual
May
Small multiples: now on by default and updated roadmap
Smart Narratives and Anomaly detection
Quickly create reports from SharePoint lists
Quick Edit Paginated Reports from the Service
Single sign-on enabled for new on-premises data sources for paginated reports
Downstream inheritance for sensitivity labels
June
Announcing Power BI in Jupyter notebooks
Announcing: Now it’s easier to find Power BI reports in Microsoft Teams tabs
Paginated Report visual white paper
July
Conditional formatting for more properties
Power BI Desktop Installer Changes & WebView2
August
X-axis constant line improvements
Power BI REST API support for DAX Queries
Power BI and Excel: Expanded Feature Availability for Power BI Free License Users (Coming Soon)
September
New formatting options for buttons
Toggle total columns in waterfall charts
Power BI Goals: automated status rules
Service Principal support for read-only Admin APIs
Export Power BI report to file API – Preview Update
October
Heat map layer – Azure Maps Visual
New API for determining who has access to what Power BI assets
Object-Level Security (OLS) is now generally available in Power BI Embedded
ODBC support for paginated reports
November
Automatic Page Refresh now supports DirectQuery for PowerBI datasets and Azure Analysis services
December
Capacity settings for datasets are now in Power BI Premium Gen2
Create Connected PivotTables in Excel for the web
Allow sharing links to include your changes to the report
Announcing Public Preview of Hybrid Tables in Power BI Premium