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

1. Return of Live events – Partial Win
2. Continued triple digit growth for Power BI – Win
3. AAS vs PBI Premium roadmap will be clear – Partial Win
4. Web based query and model editor – LOSS
5. PPU included in some sort of Office SKU – LOSS
6. New simplified editor for paginated reports based on PBUI datasets – LOSS

Jason

1. PBI Premium becomes *the way* thanks to PPU – WIN
2. Power Query will get a facelift to align with the new Power BI Desktop look and feel – LOSS
3. The SharePoint / Power BI experience will not dramatically change in 2021 – WIN
4. Creator experience starts the shift to online first, Power BI Desktop secondary – LOSS
5. A new player in the events space will emerge to fill the void that PASS Summit will leave – LOSS
6. Power Apps & Power BI integration gets better – LOSS
7. The Power BI Creator ALM experience will get better – LOSS

2022 Predictions

Jason

1. Creator experience starts the shift to online first, Power BI Desktop secondary
2. Azure Synapse will continue to grow brand awareness and the Power BI brand will start to take more of a backseat
3. The SharePoint Online Power BI v2.0 connector stays Beta for all of 2022
4. Power BI continues it’s love affair with Microsoft Teams & Excel
5. Power BI will finally get integration with Azure DevOps/GitHub
6. Microsoft Ignite Spring 2022 will be another disappointment

John

1. Clear return of In Person events – Microsoft events in the last half of the year
2. Power Query gets a standalone client with multiple output types
3. Deprecation of Azure Analysis Services
4. Some sort of licensing that includes both Power BI and Synapse
5. Web based dataset editor
6. Quick Create report experience for Synapse
7. 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

Model View Updates (preview)

New Field List (preview)

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

Power Automate for Power BI 

Small multiples: padding controls and combo chart support 

New and improved shapes

Easy report sharing via links

Microsoft Charticulator visual

May

Modern visual tooltips 

Small multiples: now on by default and updated roadmap 

New field list 

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

Small multiples 

Conditional formatting for more properties

New Model View 

Streaming dataflows 

 Power BI Desktop Installer Changes & WebView2

August

Customize shape formatting

X-axis constant line improvements

Power BI REST API support for DAX Queries

Scanner API is now in GA

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

Line chart series labels

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

Deployment pipeline APIs

Object-Level Security (OLS) is now generally available in Power BI Embedded

Power BI Angular component

ODBC support for paginated reports

November

Page and Bookmark Navigators

Formatting options

Sort legend

Scorecard visual

Power BI Embedded Gen2 

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

Sparklines

Allow sharing links to include your changes to the report

Announcing Public Preview of Hybrid Tables in Power BI Premium