The Power BI April 2024 Feature Summary came out last week, including (amongst other updates) a Brand New Visual – 100% Stacked Area Chart and a cool new Metadata Scanning sample app to help catalog and report on your organization’s Fabric items. We've also been told about the new functionality to Deliver report Subscriptions to OneDrive and SharePoint (Preview), although such Subscriptions are still only possible with a capacity-backed workspace (though PPU support is coming soon apparently). Elsewhere this week, Chandeep Chhabra has hosted Oz du Soleil presenting a Power Query Masterclass on ..read more

A couple of announcements this week. One of them has probably made itself apparent to those of you who have opened up Power BI Desktop recently, and that's the new Copilot Pane in Power BI Desktop (preview). To use this you need to have access to a workspace with an F64/P1 capacity to use as the backing compute. On the same theme, we've been provided with a Deep dive into DAX query view with Copilot, flexing some of Copilot's inline query functionality. The second announcement is on a totally different topic - and that's the support for Continuous Slide Shows in Power BI Storytelling add-in, m ..read more

Move aside SQLBits, it's FabCon week this week, and there have already been some huge announcements on the Fabric side to sink your teeth into. Grab a drink and take a read of Arun's all-encompassing blog here: Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference to get an overview of all the new and updated features. A few of the bigger ones being that Mirroring is supported in Public Preview (for Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB and Snowflake), you can now access on-premises data using the on-premises Data Gateway in Data Factory pipelines, and you can have Folders in the Workspace View! More ..read more

SQLBits is upon us - I hope a good number of you have been fortunate enough to attend this year. If anyone reading this is attending, I'll be here all week, so please come and say hi. Outside SQLBits, there's been a pretty significant announcement this week in the Power BI space, and that's the Upcoming Retirement of Power BI Premium P SKUs (for everyone apart from sovereign cloud customers). I can't say this is a huge surprise (what with the new Fabric SKUs) but it's something you should start planning for sooner rather than later. Some other announcements this week include the On-premises da ..read more

This week we've had a few more announcements. Firstly is the the announcement around the retirement of legacy Power BI Apps (pre-audiences) (honestly I hadn't realized they'd branded pre-audience apps as "Legacy"). We've also been given a summary of the Updates and enhancements for reference labels including a handful of new improvements, and we've been told about the New Data Connectors for Excel and CSV for Report Creation in Fabric. Elsewhere this week, Sandeep Pawar has written an interesting blog around Calculating and Reducing Power BI Dataset Size Using Semantic Link, Teo Lachev has sha ..read more

A flurry of announcements came shortly after last week's edition, and it's not really stopped since. First and foremost, we were provided with the Power BI February 2024 Feature Summary which contained some huge announcements. The most significant being that of Visual calculations (preview), a new way of writing DAX formulas that are scoped to a visual and make common calculations (such as cumulative sums/rolling averages) much simpler. A number of people have written about it this week, so I suggest you check them out. The next significant update (which also warranted its own blog post) is th ..read more

We're still awaiting the first Power BI feature summary of the year, but from what I can tell from chat on social media, it's going to include some pretty cool features (around TMDL and Visual Calcs). The new version of Power BI Desktop has actually already been released, so you may already be using it without knowing! Anyway, I'll leave details until the official blog has been released. So onto this week's updates. There have been a few Improvements for creating new Direct Lake semantic models (note: not the default semantic model), and we can now use Copilot to Generate measure descriptions ..read more

No Power BI specific announcements this week, but a couple of relevant announcement from the Fabric side of things. The first being that Fabric Copilot pricing has been announced, so if you're interested in taking a look at how users using Copilot will affect your billing - take a read of that blog. We've been told the billing will begin on the 1st March - so if you're an admin, you probably want to get familiar with the pricing now. The other announcement is that we can now Automate CI/CD pipelines with Microsoft Fabric Git REST APIs, so git operations are no longer confined to the Fabric UI ..read more

This week the biggest news is that the VNet Data Gateway for Fabric and Power BI is now Generally Available, which currently supports Fabric Dataflows Gen2, Power BI Semantic Models, Power Platform Dataflows, and Power BI Paginated Reports. I know this has been a common request from many organizations, so I'm sure this is welcome news for a lot of you! We've also been told about the New Solution Accelerators for Power BI Embedded Analytics for those of you embedding reports into custom apps, and for those of you working in regulated industries, you'll be glad to hear that Microsoft Fabric is n ..read more

This week we have just the one "official" announcement, and that's the Power BI Report Server January 2024 Feature Summary, which includes: the ability to show visuals as tables, more styling options for column and bar charts, and greater customization for data labels. The other announcement I wanted to highlight this week comes from the Tabular Editor blog, which is that Editing semantic models through the XMLA endpoint no longer disables web authoring of the models, giving you greater flexibility over where and how you make modifications. Elsewhere, Greg Deckler and Brian Julius have shared ..read more