Microsoft recently highlighted July updates to its Power BI service and mobile. Moreover, the data visualization service gained five new settings to tackle capacity-related issues a couple of days ago as well. Today, Microsoft has unveiled a feature summary for updates that have been brought to Power BI Desktop in this month's release.
As was announced in the tech giant's Business Applications Summit in June, a new grouping feature is being introduced to help organize visuals as an improvement to the Report authoring experience. However, that's not the only section of the service receiving updates. There are also enhancements for analytics, visualizations, data connectivity, and template apps.
Here's a condensed list that goes over all that's new:
- 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
- MarkLogic connector now generally available
- New Power Platform category within Get Data
- Template apps
- Facebook Pages – Basic Analytics
You can view the following video if you're interested in learning about the major changes in more detail:
As far as template applications are concerned, Microsoft will now regularly recommend new or popular ones that can be utilized by users with ease. For starters, "Facebook Pages – Basic Analysis" by Data Chant has been highlighted. This enables marketing professionals to analyze Facebook pages, even if they aren't administrators of said pages. Data of up to four pages can be imported simultaneously, with an associated dashboard and report appearing thereafter. These describe the performance of the pages over time based on the number of posts and shares in each. Template apps can be published in the marketplace by Microsoft partners, and you can learn more about the involved process here.
Power BI Desktop can be downloaded here from the Store. Those interested in obtaining the old .msi installation can find it here, though it will be getting deprecated next month. You can also vote for new features that you believe should be prioritized in future updates by checking out this forum.
