Power BI Monthly Update - February 2024
Hello Power BI community, this is Saveen. I'm here with the Power BI monthly update for February 2024. Now remember, I'm covering just the highlights, so if you want the details, check out the update blog.
The link is in the video description. Now let's get started. Before we get to the updates for Power BI, I have something very important to tell you. Towards the end of March, we are hosting the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference.
Of course, this heavily features Power BI, but it covers everything related to data at Microsoft. Seriously, don't miss out on this event. You'll get to meet the teams that are building all the Microsoft data and AI products. And, you'll have a chance to talk to companies and partners who are driving so much innovation in this space. The conference has 150 sessions with super deep coverage of Power BI, Fabric, Azure AI, databases, and Purview.
This is a very exclusive in person event and a unique opportunity because these sessions are not going to be recorded. They're not going to be streamed. And after the event is done, you won't be able to watch anything on demand.
We really want this to be an event where you're connecting with us and with others who are passionate about data. So don't wait. Go to aka. msfabcon and use code MSCUST for an exclusive registration discount. I know some of you may need help persuading your boss to go to this event. We've got you covered.
We have written up a really compelling convince your boss letter and I hope we'll see you in Vegas. And now on to the Power BI product updates. You can now add calculations directly on your visual using visual calculations.
These are DAX calculations that are defined and executed directly on a visual. Visual calculations make it easy to do calculations that previously were very hard or even almost impossible to do. Dynamic per recipient subscriptions are now available in preview for Power BI reports. You can now distribute a personalized copy of a Power BI report to each recipient of an email subscription. Here's a great improvement for on object interaction. Previously, when multi selecting across different visual types, the Format pane did not support any options to let you format the visuals.
But now, when you multi select different visual types, we've added formatting support for container formatting. For example, changing the size, background color, adding a shadow, or turning on and off titles in bulk. In Power BI Desktop, the Power BI Home has been redesigned.
It now provides a centralized location for all your Power BI activities within the desktop app. Starting this month, the way you write calculations in Power BI is going to change. Introducing visual calculations in Preview Now.
A visual calculation is a DAX calculation that's defined and executed directly on a visual. They make it easier to create calculations that were previously hard to write, leading to simpler DAX, easier maintenance, and better performance. Let's look at a quick example.
Here's a visual that shows sales amount and total product cost by fiscal year. And let's say I want to add a running sum for profit. Previously, I would have to write complex DAX to make this work, but with Visual Calculations, this is incredibly easy.
However, profit is nowhere to be found yet. So I first need to calculate it. All I have to do is select the visual and select new calculation.
And this opens the Visual Calculations edit mode. And here I can simply calculate profit by doing basic subtraction of sales amount minus total product cost. Now let's add that running sum. To do that, I can select the running sum template and instruct it to do a running sum over profit. Notice that the DAX expression is very easy. It's calling a new function called Running Sum with a parameter of profit.
Let's add this and check the results. See how simple this is? We provide many more templates such as moving average, average of children, percent of parent, or versus previous. Also, most existing DAX will work, so this is not a brand new language you need to learn. Finally, let me hide sales amount and total product cost from view, so we only show profit and running sum of profit on the visual.
Visual calculations have extra tricks up their sleeves. For example, since they are defined directly on a visual, They are aware of the structure of the visual they are on. They can refer to the axes of the visual for maximum flexibility. In summary, visual calculations make it easy to add calculations that were very hard to write. I'm excited for you to try this out.
So please enable the preview today and let us know what you think. Hey guys, today I'm really excited to give you a demo of dynamic subscriptions for Power BI reports, which we just released in the preview. This gives you the ability to create dynamic emails for each of your recipients.
If you are familiar with SSRS, you might know this as data driven subscription. I'm starting with my regional sales report. This report shows sales overview and opportunities for my sales organization. Now for this demo, what I want to do is to send each of my sales personnel an email with their own view of this report. To achieve this, I'll create a new email subscription. And we can see a difference here.
We can now create a dynamic per recipient. The first step in the dynamic per recipient subscription is to find the data set that contains both the email and the filtering data that I want to send to. In this case, I'm selecting the regional sales report, which is the same data set used by this report. Now I can select my recipients. and the filters that will select their custom view of the data.
My salesperson table has email address and the name. In this case, I don't want all of them to receive an email, so I'm also selecting weeks open, which tells me how long this opportunity was open. And I want to select just the ones that are open for greater than, let's say, 22 days. This gives me a subset of the data. Now, to explain what will happen, each row generated in this view will result in one email with a custom view to each of the recipients.
Now we can enter the details of the subscriptions. The first thing that I want to do is to map the recipients. In this case, the recipients come from the field I selected in the previous view, email address. I can also customize the subject to come from a data set. In this case, I'll map this to the sale person name just so we can easily distinguish the emails. I can set different properties.
For example, which is the page that I'll get a preview from. In this case, I'll disable the link to the report and my attachment will be in PDF. Now in this page, I can map the data that will customize each of the views. The first option indicates if I want the current static selections that I made in my report, like filters, highlights, and slicers to be included or not. In this case, I will say that I do want this custom field.
And what makes this process very interesting is that I can create dynamic filters that will be applied for each recipient. In this case, I want to add one additional report level filter in the salesperson name field. And I want to map this to each row on the salesperson name value. This defines the schedule just like as standard subscriptions. And in this case, I'll set it disabled just for the purpose of this demo. I can review my data.
What is the schedule? How is my data mapped? And what is the field that will create the additional filters? How the email address is mapped, and also which datasets it's being used. Everything looks good, so let's keep going. Data stream subscriptions are represented with a link item, indicated that they are connected to a semantic model.
Now, let's fire the subscription. And all we have to do now is wait a little bit. Now I switch to the inbox, where we can see where the subscriptions were received. Each email here represents one of the email subscriptions that were processed with different views. we can see what is the email that it was sent to, and also how it was filtered specifically to each user. So all the data is sent with the context that is relevant to this recipient.
And the same is true for the attached files. In this case, we can see that the report PDF was sent to Sanjay. And all the information is related to his view. Welcome to the new Power BI Home and Desktop. I'm Juan, a product manager in the Power BI team, and today I'm going to drive you to the new capabilities.
With a similar feel from the Microsoft Office and Power Platform products, the new Power BI Home is your personal content hub. Let's start with the first section, the news section. Here, you can create a brand new report by just clicking into the report icon. Second, we have the recommended section.
The logic behind the recommendation comes from four user signals. The first one being, you view a report, you recently modified a report, someone in your organization edited this report, or someone in your organization shared a report with you. Finally, we have the quick access list. In the quick access list, we have two different categories. The first one being recent, where you're going to be able to see all the files that you recently modified or viewed.
And share with me, that you're going to be able to see all the files that someone in your organization shared with you. In this list, comes with all the descriptions from the file, as the name, location, and date. With all these new capabilities, we aim to provide you More fortunatelies for you to be able to discover content in Barbie Eichholz.
I hope you enjoy it and please provide us as much feedback as possible. Copilot is here to help you with modeling. Fabric Copilot for Power BI can now add descriptions to your semantic model measures. This makes it even easier for people to use your semantic models because good descriptions serve as essential documentation. When creating a report in Power BI, You can hover over the measures in the data pane and see the name and description of each measure.
This gives model authors indications on what this measure does and how to use them in the visuals of the report. Model authors can create these descriptions on measures by going to the model view and clicking on one of the measures. And in the properties pane, you have a description box. And now we are introducing a way to create these descriptions with Copilot.
So a key documentation task is now at a click of a button, and you can see that Copilot will look at the DACS formula, and look at the name, and generate a description. You can go ahead and click keep it to keep this description, and it will be added to that description box in the properties pane. To add these to other measures, you would click on the measure, and then in the properties pane in that measure, click on the create with Copilot button. You can also discard if you've gone ahead and created one and you don't want to add it there. Um, and you can always re enter and then add the description from Copilot.
So even for long DAX expressions, such as the one from the quick measures, you can go ahead and concatenate some values, and it'll create a description based off of what it sees in the DAX formula. So as you go one by one, it gives you an opportunity to review what Copilot has generated. Um, you can also co copy what was there before or what Copilot has generated from that dialogue. And here you can go ahead and see, even for like a comparative measure, such as a year over year change, Copilot sees that that is a comparative measure and puts that in the description. Now finally, You can always edit whatever Copilot generates and puts in the description box, just like you can with any description on any measure in your model. So now what happens when you've already created a description, and then you've gone ahead and made a change to that DAX expression? Once you're happy with your change to DAX expression, just click the button again, and Copilot will generate a new description based on the updated DAX formula.
You can go ahead and keep it just like before, and even edit it once it comes back and is in the description box. So now that we've added in our descriptions here with Copilot, we can go back to Report View. And when I'm hovering over my measures now, I see not only the name, but I also see that description that was provided by Copilot. And as always with any of these features, you have full control over what it is. If it's added to the description, and you can modify it once it's already generated and added to the description box. Now finally, I have another update for you on the Model Explorer.
So if you go back to the Model View, and you're in the Model Explorer, and you go to Semantic Model, previously we were able to see the server of the local instance of Desktop, but now you can also copy through the Copy button. Or highlight the text and use control C to get that information. Thank you. We've improved how you can use the Power BI add in. Now, when adding the Power BI add in to a presentation, you can pick a report that is suggested for you, or you can paste a link to a specific report.
For example, by using the URL in the browser address bar. And if your organization allows it, The add in can replace the link you pasted with a shareable link. There's a checkbox to enable the use of the shareable link.
The shareable link ensures that others viewing this presentation will have the required permissions to see the report and they will not have to request access when viewing the presentation. Have you tried out the new explore feature yet? This month we added a new data overview feature there. This overview is powered by Copilot, and it gives you a summary of what's contained in the data that you're exploring, and some highlights, some interesting tidbits to get you started. We introduced the shared device mode last September, but it is now generally available. This lets organizations safely deploy the Power BI mobile app across their pool of shared devices. For Power BI custom visuals, there's a new local storage API.
This API allows custom visuals to store data directly in the local browser. Data stored this way is more secure and will improve the performance of web apps. The February release also introduces support for the new on object interaction. This enhancement allows users to build and customize visuals directly on the visual in Power BI Desktop. So, for example, this lets you add a field or change a visualization type or format text. The main objective of Power BI Desktop Developer Mode is to provide friendly source control and a great co development experience.
Keeping that in mind, you can now save your Power BI project files using Tabular Model Definition Language, TMDL format. TMDL is easily readable and editable in any text editor. In this update, we bring the tabular model definition language, also known as TIMDL, to the Power BI project file format, replacing the existing model.
dim file that uses the tabular model scripting language, also known as TIMSL. Improving significantly the source control and co development experience when working with a Power BI project file format. You start by enabling the preview feature, store semantic model using Tymdal format, and restart desktop.
After restart, you can open an existing PBIP that is currently using the model. bin file, and because you have the Tymdal preview feature enabled, when you save, Desktop will prompt you asking if you want to upgrade into Timdall. And if you click upgrade, the model. pim file is replaced by the definition folder using the Timdall format. Let's do a git commit mentioning that we just converted into Timdall.
And let's make a change to the semantic model using desktop. By doing an uppercase text to the English product name column of the product table. After the data refresh, if I save and go back to VS Code. I'll see a much better git diff comparing to the dimsle version. Not only I get the diff on the product table tmdl file, but I can also easily understand the change in a clear Power Query text without any escaping characters. Let's also do a git commit.
And if you notice, my Visual Studio code is applying syntax highlighting to my Tymdal documents. And that's because I installed the Microsoft Tymdal language extension for VS Code. And you should install it too if you want a better experience viewing and authoring Tymdal documents. And now it's time to sync DevOps repo.
And if that repo is connected to a Fabric workspace using the Fabric Git integration, After I upgrade my workspace with the latest changes from Git, my semantic model in the service will also be upgraded to use Dimdle. This means that, if I change the semantic model in the service, Using web modeling, for example, hide the sales amount base column and go back to the workspace to commit this change. Fabric Git will also use Tymdal as the export format, and I will be able to see the file diff also using the Tymdal format, giving me a much better diff experience like in Power BI Desktop, but this time in Azure DevOps. And of course, we have many great visualizations this month, and we have our editor's picks for this quarter.
Have you ever wondered how to collaborate with your colleagues on sensitive data without compromising security? And have you wanted to learn how to use Microsoft Purview Information Protection Sensitivity Labels to protect your data? Then we have some good news for you. Here's a great demo showing you how you can collaborate with these protected PBIX files in Power BI Desktop. Hello everyone. In this quick demo, we're excited to showcase the latest enhancement we've made to protected labels within Power BI Desktop. Before we delve into details, let's quickly revisit the concept of sensitivity labels. On the top left, you'll find the sensitivity bar, which displays all the labels that you can apply to Power BI and Fabric items.
These labels aid us in classifying content in line with company policy. Additionally, we have labels with protection capabilities easily identifiable by a small lock icon. Your permissions for the protected labels are managed by a compliance admin in the Microsoft Purview Compliance Center.
Here in the label settings, you can view all the labels existing in your tenant. When editing permissions, admins can specify which user or security groups these permissions apply to. The process of defining permission is straightforward. Previously, to open a protected PBX file, you needed to be assigned either full control, export content, or a combination of save and edit rights. Our new feature allows users with a combination of edit content, save.
Copy and extract, and allow macros to open a protected PBIX file albeit with certain limitations to ensure compliance. These permissions can also be found in the commonly assigned co author permission preset. Returning to our report in Power BI, notice that the protected label has been applied by your colleague. If you lack the necessary permissions to edit the label, and attempt to download the report to use Power BI Desktop.
You will be restricted according to the protected labels enforcement in Power BI today. To enable more users to open a protected PBX according to the permission assigned by the compliance admin, the Fabric admin first needs to enable our feature in the Information Protection section. Then, when you open the Power BI Desktop, go to Preview Feature menu and enable it accordingly. Now, when we'll try to download again, we'll be able to open the protected PBX, but with several limitations. We can't edit the sensitivity label or export to unsupported formats, such as CSV.
And are only allowed to republish to the original workspace. This is to maintain compliance with Power BI permissions. Thank you for your time, and we hope you find this demo informative. Each month, we highlight a community member that's making a positive impact in our community. Meet Andrei Khaidarov. He's a newly awarded MVP, a super user, and as you can see, he has been very active in the community.
Some fun facts about Andrei. He's an explorer at heart and has visited 38 countries. He's really active riding motorbikes, playing volleyball, and even doing drone videography. The things that he is interested in balance physical activity and creative expression to complement his passion for data analysis. It's great getting to know you, Andrei, and thank you for being part of our community. That's all for this month.
Please visit our Power BI community forums at aka. ms slash Power BI community. It is the best place for you to get connected and to get answers to your questions. And please, let us know how we could do better. We are listening.
Like, comment, and subscribe. And thanks for watching.
2024-02-24 15:34
