We’re going to start publishing a run down on the latest Power BI updates!
It looks like the Minnesota Vikings are pleased the updates are here!
And whilst there isn’t a huge amount this month, there are two things which everyone seems to be getting hyped about – Dashboard Design and Themes! Power BI has updated their default theme to a much nicer look, and they’ve also made it much easier to create custom themes. Custom format strings have also been added.
You can either take a look at the latest video release from Microsoft below, or look at our notes underneath them to get a quick overview of what’s to come!
Reporting Updates
Much easier to write a custom theme
Colour classes you can now set are foreground, foregroundNeutralSecondary, foregroundNeutralTertiary, backgroundLight, backgroundNeutral, background and TableAccent.
Text classes you can now set are Title, Label, Callout and Header. There are also secondary classes which you can set, however if you do not set them, they will look at what you have set as your main classes and adapt to these.
New themes
Power BI now has a new default theme. Some big positives here is the text is now bigger and darker on charts. Also, the default colours seem to be a bit more vibrant.
Along with this they also have a lot of custom themes you can choose to apply. Some change background colours, some make the colours a gradient of a colour (lots of reds). You can also use the “classic” theme which will go back to the theme which was default before this update.
Unpin visuals from the visualisation pane
You can now get rid of visuals from your visualisation pane by right clicking on a visual and clicking “unpin this visual”. To get the defaults back, click on the 3 dots at the bottom right and click “restore default visuals”. This could be useful to declutter this space if you don’t use a certain visual or have a bunch of custom visuals loaded in. (Currently a preview feature so you will need to turn this on in “file – options and settings – preview features”).
Analytics Updates
Custom Format Strings
There seems to be a lot of big hype around this! You can now add custom formatting to your strings, E.G. if you have a number “1234” you can now tell Power BI to show this as “£1,234 (£000’s)”.
More Conditional Formatting
The quest to have the entire dashboard conditionally formattable continues. Power BI have been adding to what you can use conditional formatting on for a few months now and this month is no different. You can now also conditionally format a visuals border as well as you can fully conditionally format the gauge visual.
Drill Through Visibility
Previously it wasn’t obvious which charts have drill through functionality. Now if a chart has this option there will be a hint in the tooltip letting you know to right click to access the drill through page.
More DAX
RemoveFilters and Convert are now useable in Power BI. RemoveFilters seems pretty similar to the ALL expression when used inside the calculate expression. Convert changes the data type of the expression.
Custom Visuals
Power Apps Generally Available
This has been in preview for a while but it’s now generally available. This is the Visual which helps you create custom apps.
Connectivity
PostgreSQL connector improvements
Data Preparation
Copy To Clipboard From Data Profiling
You can now copy the fancy column stats Power BI gives you in the query editor. This could be useful if you wanted to run some further analysis on your data distributions.
Other
Performance Improvements For Multi-Dimensional Models And Direct Queries
If you’d like to know more about Power BI and how it can help you business then please get in touch!