Power BI Enhancements

One of the things we love most about Power BI is Microsoft’s commitment to the product, as demonstrated by its rapid development cycle. Every month, the Power BI team delivers requested features and improvements to both functionality and user experience. We boil it down to the news you can use, and here’s what you need to know for April 2020…

The Big Deal
Personalized Visuals
The self-service enthusiasts will be…enthused! With this new feature enabled in Preview, the end user can customize their view of the visual. That includes changing the chart type, the axis, the measure, and tool-tip via a drop-down menu. Reverting changes is as easy as clicking the eraser icon. Bonus? Not only can users personalize a visual, they can then save it as a personal bookmark, and then set the bookmark as their default view.
Administrators and report developers will be equally enthused, as personalizing visuals does not create copies of reports, nor does it change the report for other users in any way. No version control mess to clean up. See a demo here.

The Rest of the Story…
April update had some additional goodies worth mentioning:
Relative Time filter that works like the Relative Date filters – except has hours and minutes as intervals.
Conditional Formatting is now available for totals and subtotals.
Direct query support has been added for the new AI visuals
Decomposition Tree and Key Influencers.

New Data Connectors & Template Apps
Power BI can connect to almost any data source. While most needs are covered by the basic database and file connectors, Power BI offers an array of specialized connectors that help you connect to specific systems or web sources. This month, the new connector is for Microsoft Workplace Analytics. Azure Cost Management connector also got an update, so if you happen to be using it, be sure to update your Power BI Desktop.