Announcing the Power BI Desktop November Update | Microsoft …

Were releasing today a new Power BI Desktop update, which is loaded with tons of new features. Precisely, 26 new features have been added or improved in this release. Some of these features have been requested by many of you so we expect you will really enjoy this update.

This months update includes lots of new features, spread across all areas of the product ranging from 6 new data connectors to 15 new report authoring capabilities, as well as new data modeling and data preparation features.

Heres a summary of all new features in this release:

Report Authoring

Data Modeling

Data Connectivity

Data Transformations

Other Improvements

You can watch the following video or continue reading below for more details about each feature.

With this update, were making significant improvements to the Report Authoring capabilities in Power BI Desktop. Were bringing 15 new and improved features to this release:

Play Axis for Scatter Chart

One popular feature of Scatter Charts in Excel Power View is the ability to define a Play Axis based on a series dimension (date, numbers, etc.). This feature was missing in Power BI Desktop, but it has been added in this release.

When creating a Scatter Chart, users can now also add a field to the Play Axis section. This will create a Play Axis below the Scatter Chart visualization, which users can interact with to play/pause the animation.

See Play Axis for Scatter Chart in action in the following video.

Horizontal Slicers

In this update, we have added support for controlling the orientation of Slicer items so users can switch between vertical (previous behavior) and horizontal. This option can be found in the Formatting pane for Slicer visualizations, under the General section.

See Horizontal Slicers in action in the following video.

Slicer Selection Behaviors (single vs. multi-select)

Another improvement for Slicer visuals this month is the ability to control the selection behaviors: having a Select All option or not, and multi-select vs. single-select behavior.

These options are available in the Formatting pane for Slicer visualizations, under the Selection Controls section.

See Slicer Selection Behaviors in action in the following video.

Control Z-order

With this update, were making it easier to control the Z-order of items within the Report canvas. Users can now leverage the Arrange options in the Home tab in the ribbon to send items to front/back or forwards/backwards.

See Z-Order Control in action in the following video.

Background Colors for Slides

We have added an option to customize the background color of Report pages. This option is available in the Formatting pane when the page is selected (i.e. no other visual is selected). You can achieve this by clicking on an empty area on the page.

See Background Colors for Slides in action in the following video.

Interactions between Visuals Subview (tile by)

With Power BI Desktop, users can easily combine multiple visualization elements in a single page. Once there are multiple elements in a page, the default behavior is such that selecting elements in a given visualization will cross-filter or cross-highlight the related data in other visualizations within the same page.

For example, in the following screenshot, selecting 1984 in the top-left column chart will result in the scatter chart and tree map being filtered to only show data for that year.

With the November update, were introducing a new feature called Visual Interactions (also known as Brushing and Linking) that allows users to customize this behavior. With this feature, during report authoring, you can edit the visual interactivity option from the ribbon, select each visual that would act as the source of brushing and set the interactivity level in each of the consuming visuals in the same page without any layout restriction.

This option is available in the Home tab in the ribbon, under Visual Interactions -> Edit.

You can see this feature in action in the following video.

Duplicate Pages

One commonly requested feature by many of you is being able to duplicate pages in your reports. This would save you time when building multiple pages with the same layout, so you can use a page as a template that then you could customize.

In this update, were adding Duplicate Page as an option in the contextual menu for a page tab at the bottom of the report view.

See Duplicate Page in action in the following video.

Support for Images and KPIs in Tables, Matrices and Cards

We have enabled support for Images and KPI elements within the following visuals: Tables, Matrix and Card.

In order to use KPI elements, you can consume them from a data source that supports KPIs, such as Analysis Services or Excel PowerPivot models.

Images can be enabled in your reports by categorizing a text column containing URLs to image files as Image URL. To do this, select the field in the Fields pane and assign the Image URL category in the Data Tools Modeling tab in the ribbon.

Once a field has been categorized as an Image URL, users can view the images in Tables. Matrices and Cards.

See these features in action in the following video.

Better Tooltips on Area Charts & Line Charts

We have made improvements to the logic to display tooltips in area charts & line charts data points, so that the displayed tooltips dont overlap with the actual data points.

Ability to change Text size in Cards & Tables/Matrix

It is now possible to customize the size of text in Cards and Tables/Matrix visuals. This can be achieved via the Formatting pane, under Data Label

Improved tooltips and labels in Field Well and Formatting panes

In this update we have added tooltips to better describe the functionality in Field Well and Formatting Panes elements.

Ability to see Categories with no data

Visualizations will now display categories with no data. For instance, column charts will display all categories in the X-axis, even those where the Y-axis value is 0 (i.e. due to a filter condition, etc.).

Improved Default Sort behaviors for visuals

We have improved the default sorting behavior for items within a visual. For instance, when displaying a column chart, we will default to sort ascending by the value in the categorical axis, or when sorting by the measure being displayed, we will default to descending sort.

Ability to control Axis Scale display units

It is now possible to customize the display unit in the Axis values. This option can be accessed from the Y-axis section in the Formatting pane.

Visuals Refresh Optimizations for basic modeling operations

In this update we have made several optimizations so that many basic modeling operations do not require refreshing all your report visuals. Applying these modeling operations (such Show/Hide Fields, All Formatting, Default Summarization, Default Categorization) will result in only the affected visuals being refreshed, rather than all visuals as it was the case in previous releases.

Basic Automatic Date Features.

This month were adding a first set of automatic date capabilities to the product. This first wave of automatic date features consists on automatic detection of Date columns in a visual and enablement of Drill Down/Up behaviors.

When dragging a DateTime field to the Field Well, it will get automatically expanded to the entire Date hierarchy (Years, Quarters, Months, Days). The associated charts will also get Drill Down/Up icons that can be used to navigate through the data in different levels of aggregation (by year, by quarter, etc.).

You can see this feature in action in the following video.

Were adding several new Data Connectors to Power BI Desktop with this months update. A total of 6 new data connectors, with many of them being highly demanded in our Feature Suggestions forum over the past few months.

SSAS Multidimensional Exploration/Live mode support

This month were enabling a Preview of the Exploration/Live mode for SQL Server Analysis Services multidimensional models. This is one of the most commonly requested features by many of you and were glad to announce its availability.

In order to try out this feature, you will need to enable it in the list of Preview features. This list can be found under File -> Options -> Global -> Preview Features.

Once this Preview feature has been enabled, users can simply select SQL Server Analysis Services in the Get Data dialog (under Databases category). When connecting to SQL Server Analysis Services, users can select Exploration/Live mode. This option has been available since July for Tabular models, but was not supported for Multidimensional models until now.

After providing connection details, users get connected to the SQL Server Analysis Services instance and are able to browse to the desired cube.

Once they select a cube and click Load, they will be taken into the Report view without having to wait for data to load. At this point, they can drag & drop fields into the Report canvas to author new visualizations. These visualizations will run queries directly against the remote server in order to display the desired information by the user.

In order to use this feature, you need to have SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4 or above version of Analysis Services. You can consume Default Members, Dimension Attributes, Dimension Calculated Members, Dimension Attribute types, Measures (with or without Measure groups), Measures as Variant, KPIs, Image URLs and Dimension security.

The feature does not currently have support for hierarchies, display folders, KPI trends, translations and non-aggregatable attributes. Also with this build you cannot publish the report connecting to MD models to the Power BI service. They will be added in subsequent updates before general availability.

You can see this feature in action in the following video.

SAP Hana

SAP HANA is a key Enterprise BI data source and Power BI connectivity is a sought after feature from Enterprise customers to unlock the insights and get 360-degree overview.

This connector allows users with SAP HANA information models (Analytic Views and Calculation Views) to bring their data into Power BI Desktop. In order to use this feature, users need to install the SAP HANA ODBC driver first on their client machines. The SAP ODBC driver can be downloaded from the SAP support site. If you dont have access to SAP Marketplace, check with your IT department to get the necessary SAP HANA ODBC driver.

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Announcing the Power BI Desktop November Update | Microsoft ...