Power BI March Updates

Power BI, Microsoft’s suite of business analytics tools has had a lot of updates this month. Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in March.

General Availability (GA) of Multi Geo for Power BI Premium

Microsoft has announced the General Availability of Multi Geo for Power BI Premium.  This update allows for the extension of your Power BI tenant to store your users’ data in the geographies covered in the Microsoft Trust Centre. Multi Geo can also improve the performance of a dataset refresh, specifically for cloud-based data sources. This feature is utilised by changing the location of existing Power BI Premium capacities or by acquiring new dedicated capacities. Check out this document to learn more about this feature best.

Azure AD B2B Guest users can now edit and manage content

This makes it easier for external users to collaborate with colleagues across organisational boundaries, by editing and managing content and allowing for access to content administration tasks. Organisational relationships and collaborations between contractors and customers, and between multiple organisations are made easier and more cost effective due to this update. Access settings can be found in Tenant settings, where the Power BI admin can enable access and choose which external users can edit and manage content such as reports, dashboards, apps, connect to data and work in workspaces. Read the Microsoft whitepaper for more details and best practices.

Along with these two big updates, there has also been many more small, yet powerful updates this month.

Reporting:

• Heat map support for Bing maps – you can now convert all the location dots on your maps to a heat map layer through the Power BI formatting pane
• Filter pane improvement – options have been simplified with a new ‘clear’ button
• Page alignment options – choose to align your report pages to the top instead of the centre
• Formatting updates for maps – adjust map points to a smaller size and add zoom buttons to your map
• Accessible visual interaction – access data points on many of the built-in visuals using keyboard navigation

Analytics:

• Q&A recommendations for improving results – the Q&A dialogue now includes ‘Did you mean?’ recommendations to help improve search results
• Show dates as a hierarchy now generally available – for each date column, each hierarchy level is shown in the field list which can also be used in visuals

Modelling:

• New modelling view now generally available – including bulk editing of columns, measures and tables, setting display folders on columns, measures and hierarchies, dragging and dropping into display folders and multiple diagram layouts
• New DAX functions – you can now use ContainsString or ContainsStringExact to get a Boolean value (so you can know if a text field contains a specific string). Using DistinctCountNoBlank will return a SQL-like distinct count where blank values aren’t counted, and the LookupValue function has been extended to avoid raising any errors.

Check out even more updates from this month and get excited for what might come next in April!

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References:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-march-2019-feature-summary/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-power-bi-multi-geo-general-availability/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-ad-b2b-guest-users-can-now-edit-and-manage-content-in-power-bi-to-collaborate-better-across-organizations/