Welcome to the June 2023 update! This month, we are pleased to announce updates to On-Object interaction, a new demo experience to the Power BI embedded playground which simplifies the process of exploring embedding Power BI in your application, creating Power BI reports instantly with Jupyter Notebooks, and Power BI Desktop Developer mode.

Contents

Reporting

New card visual

With this latest update, we’re thrilled to introduce our new card visual feature, which you can find in the core visual gallery. If you prefer, you can also access it as a preview feature under Options > Preview features > New card visual. You can display multiple cards by dragging and dropping all fields or measures into the ‘Data‘ field well.

The new card visual comes with special surprises that include:

Customize the shape corners to achieve your desired style.

Refined formatting settings for values and labels, with expanded support for conditional formatting and the introduction of font transparency.

Customize your display units with precision control, thanks to the new custom option and ensure your cards display the proper content, even when no data is found, with the new ‘Show blank as‘ feature.

Choose from three layouts (Horizontal, vertical, and grid) and fine-tune your cards by adjusting the padding, spacing, and text alignment.
Take your design to the next level with the addition of ‘Image’ and ‘Accent bar’.

Bring your data to life with interactivity features like tooltips and drill through.

‘Themes’ allows you to control all formatting settings to personalize your default styles.

Please note that the new card visual is just the beginning! In the coming months, we plan to add even more capabilities and features to make it even better. Stay tuned for exciting updates!

OneLake data hub in Power BI Desktop

The data hub in Power BI Desktop serves as a central location for discovering and reusing data. With the recent Fabric release, we are excited to announce the rebranding of the data hub as the “OneLake data hub.”

OneLake Data Hub in Power BI Desktop allows you to reuse existing Fabric items and create your own datasets and reports on top of them. It supports the following items: data warehouses, lakehouses, their related SQL endpoints, datamarts, and datasets (coming later this year: KQL databases).

For lakehouses and their SQL endpoints, as well as datamarts and warehouses, you have two options to get-data:

Connect to the underlying auto-generated dataset.
Connect directly to the SQL endpoint to create your own dataset.

The OneLake data hub in Power BI Desktop is your gateway to Fabric data ecosystem.

On-Object Interaction – Updates

The new on-object interaction feature released to preview in March. This month we bring the top improvement requested, the ability to re-attach the build menu as a pane!

Now users can attach the build menu to the pane switcher by 1 of 3 ways:

Directly from the on-object button:

From the View ribbon:

From the options menu:

Along with the ability to re-attach the build menu, we also added a setting to allow users to choose to have the pane switcher always shown. Both of these 2 new settings will persist across reports. Coming soon next month, we’ll be adding even more customization to the pane switcher! Look out for 2 new features: a new “add” button on the pane switcher to quickly add new panes without having to go to the ribbon and even better, saving those newly added panes on the pane switcher across reports.

Another addition this month is setting and editing conditional formatting from the on-object mini toolbars:

As well as drag/drop precision improvements within the on-object build menu’s field wells, including auto-opening the build menu when dragging a field:

Thanks for continuing to try out the new preview and provide feedback. We’re working hard to react to your suggestions and add the necessary changes to make on-object work for you. Please continue to provide your comments directly in this blog post or in our community forum via the “Share feedback” button next to the preview switch.

Data connectivity and preparation

Introducing Visual Cue for New Tenant Settings

We are excited to announce the addition of a new feature for tenant admins. With visual cue in the admin portal, admins can now easily identify and manage new settings within their Power BI environment.

Changes within the tenant settings page in the admin portal are tagged with the new icon to help admins discover new settings. Further, a summary of all new settings is available at the top of the page that links directly to the corresponding settings, aiding quick navigation and management of tenant-level controls. Stay informed and take full control of your Power BI tenant settings with Visual Cue!

Introducing the Tenant Admin Settings API

We are thrilled to introduce a new API that empowers developers to read tenant admin settings within Power BI. With the Tenant Admin Settings API, you can effortlessly retrieve and access a wide range of administrative settings programmatically. With just one API endpoint, you can effortlessly access all the required tenant-level admin settings such as on/off status, security group configuration, etc. Unlock new possibilities for automating tenant setting audit by leveraging the Tenant Admin Settings API. Streamline your administrative workflows and harness the full potential of Power BI with this exciting addition!

Service

Storytelling in PowerPoint – Embed visuals from Power BI organizational apps

You can now embed visuals from organizational apps into your PowerPoint presentation – you just need the link to the visual you want to embed. To get the link, open your organizational app and find the visual you want to embed. Open the visual’s More options (…) menu, select the Share option, and then choose either Link to this visual or Open in PowerPoint. Copy the generated link and paste it into the add-in in your presentation.

Edit your data model in the Power BI Service – Updates

The new data model editing in the Service feature released to preview in April. We’ve been busy reacting to your feedback and enhancing the experience. Below are the improvements added this month:

Improve layouts limitations

Changes you make to layouts in the Service will now be saved for future sessions, including:

Any additional custom layouts you create or delete in the Service. The corresponding name and tables added/removed to these layouts will also be saved.
All visual alterations you make to a layout such as the size and location of cards, expand all/collapse all fields in a card, and pinning fields to the top of a card.

Please note that any layout changes made within the Power BI Service will only be saved within the Service itself. Currently, there is a limitation where uploading a .PBIX file to the Service will not include any existing layout changes, including custom layouts created in Desktop. Similarly, when downloading the .PBIX file, any layout changes made in the Service, including custom layouts, will not appear in Power BI Desktop. However, we are actively working to remove these limitations, stay tuned for updates!

Introducing a new admin setting to control email subscriptions for B2B guest users

As a tenant admin, you now have improved control over email subscriptions specifically for B2B guest users. Turning on the new B2B guest users can set up and be subscribed to email subscriptions setting allows B2B guest users to create their own email subscriptions as well as users in your organization to include B2B users as recipients of email subscriptions. With this setting turned off, only users in your organization can set up and be subscribed to email subscriptions.

There may be cases where you would like B2B guest users to be able to access content in the Power BI service but would like to prevent them from distributing content using email subscriptions.

The default state of this new setting, upon release, will match the state of the general setting for email subscriptions, Users can set up email subscriptions.

Admin Monitoring

With the increased focus on governance, compliance, and policy, customers need greater visibility into workflows related to these areas. The new Admin Monitoring Workspace delivers curated insights that help you better manage, administer, and govern your tenant.

The Public Preview release includes the Feature Usage and Adoption dataset and report, which provide tenant admins with insights based on inventory metadata and audit logs, enabling them to:

understand who is doing what
track tenant usage and adoption growth
support audits and ensure compliance

By default, the Admin Monitoring Workspace will be available only to Tenant Admins, who can choose to share the workspace or specific reports within it with others in their organization.

How can the Out-of-Box report/dataset help you succeed?

The Feature Usage and Adoption report provides analytical views built on the Audit Logs to help you understand who is doing what, enabling you to better govern Power BI by identifying specific trends, patterns, and activities. For example, you may discourage direct report sharing from personal workspaces and may want to have visibility if this happens.
The Feature Usage and Adoption dataset will contain tenant metadata dimensions of most Power BI items as well as Audit Log fact data about asset lifecycle activities such as create, access, modify, and delete. We’ll provide access to a subset of Audit Log data directly through the dataset, so you won’t need Microsoft 365 admin rights to view this audit data.
To take advantage of Power BI native support for composite data modelling, the out-of-box dataset can be reused and enhanced with additional data such as user licensing information, data lineage data, regional or department-specific metadata. This facilitates customized reporting based on individual organizational scenarios.

Embedded

Get started with Power BI embedded in minutes

We have recently added a new demo experience to the Power BI embedded playground which simplifies the process of exploring embedding Power BI in your application. With this demo, you can easily generate code that you can copy and paste to preview how the report will fit in your app. Even if you haven’t created your own reports, you can generate demo code for our sample report to see how it would look in your application.

Once you’re satisfied with the embedded content, you can select the solution that best fits your needs and follow the relevant tutorial to create the necessary code. After that, you can also use our Client APIs to enhance the interactions between the report and your app and custom fit the look and feel of the report to your app. These APIs can be tested and interacted with in our “Explore our APIs” or “Developer Sandbox” pages.

Create Power BI reports instantly in Jupyter Notebooks

The latest version of the powerbi-jupyter Python library enables the creation of new Power BI reports directly from data within the notebook, providing instant insight without the need for switching between different tools or performing any exports from the notebook. This new update supplements the existing ability to embed Power BI reports in Jupyter notebooks, enabling you to enhance your notebook with any of your existing Power BI content to tell a compelling data story.

The newly created report will be an auto-generated report, based on the data from the DataFrame passed as input. The report can be customized and modified, and it can be saved to Power BI to keep the report and share it with others in your organization. You can use this report to explore your data or as starting place for creating your own custom report.

Developers

Power BI Desktop Developer Mode

Power BI customers demand enterprise BI solutions that scale to all users across the largest organizations. This depends on enabling team collaboration and automation of deployments across development, test, and production environments to meet the needs of mission-critical BI systems. We are thrilled to announce the public preview of Power BI Desktop Developer Mode, taking advantage of Microsoft’s deep heritage in enterprise BI, and bringing Pro BI developer experiences right into Power BI Desktop.

Power BI Desktop introduces a new way to author, collaborate, and save your projects. You can now save your work as a Power BI Project (PBIP). When saving as project, report, and dataset definitions are saved as individual plain text files in a simple, intuitive folder structure.

As a developer, you can use this integration to:

Use Power BI Desktop to author report and dataset metadata files in source-control friendly formats.
Enable multiple developer collaboration, source control integration to track version history, compare different revisions (diff), and revert to previous versions.

Build continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows to enforce quality gates prior to reaching production environments.
Enable code reviews, automated testing, and automated build to validate the integrity of a deployment.

With the combination of Power BI Desktop Developer Mode, Fabric Git Integration, Azure DevOps and Deployment Pipelines, developers gain the ability to seamlessly sync their Power BI workspaces with Git repositories, ensuring consistency and facilitating CI/CD workflows.

By utilizing Git as the centralized repository for your developments, you establish it as the “source of truth”. This integration allows you to commence your report development in Power BI Desktop, seamlessly transition to the Service, and return to Power BI Desktop, where every modification is securely backed up and versioned by Git.

Watch the recording of the Empower every BI professional to do more with data session at Microsoft Build for an end-to-end demonstration of Power BI Desktop Developer Mode together with Fabric Git Integration.

Saving as a Power BI Project file is in public preview. To use this feature first go to File > Options and settings > Options > Preview features and check the box next to “Power BI Project (.pbip) save option”.

Visualizations

New visuals in AppSource

The following are new visuals for this update:

Create the most interactive waterfall charts

Drill Down Waterfall PRO by ZoomCharts lets you create stunning charts like never before, giving you full control over the look and feel of your chart with features such as:

Sub-totals – set display values in your dataset or let our visual automatically calculate them for you, saving you time and effort.
Rich customization options – customize increasing, decreasing, and totals series separately with options for colors, outlines, column widths, column connectors, value labels, and more.
Static and dynamic thresholds – demonstrate targets with up to 4 thresholds for a clear visual representation of your data.
Touch device friendly – explore data easily on both mouse and touch input devices.

This visual is most often used for:

Accounting & finance – profit and loss statements.
Inventory management – opening stock, stock movement, and closing stock.
Human resources – change in staff numbers over time.

ZoomCharts Drill Down Visuals are known for their interactive drilldowns, smooth animations, and rich customization options. They support interactions, custom and native tooltips, filterin, and bookmarks. Use them to create visually appealing and intuitive reports that business users will love on every device.

PowerGantt Chart by Nova Silva

We are delighted to receive ongoing feedback from you, and we want to express our gratitude for your valuable contributions. Your insights help us to make significant enhancements to our visuals.

In the last version of the PowerGantt Chart, we have added a new feature that allows you to include a baseline planning. You can view the baseline planning as a thinner bar located beneath the main task bar. In the image below, the purple bar represents the baseline planning.

Besides supporting parent-child hierarchies, the PowerGantt Chart now allows you to group tasks by any categorical variable.

As part of our commitment to support the standard Power BI user interface, we have added a number of exciting new Power BI features to all our visuals: On-object interaction, subtitle and divider.

We are confident these enhancements will improve your experience with the PowerGantt Chart and enable you to achieve your goals more efficiently. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to bringing you more exciting updates in the future.

Try the PowerGantt Chart for FREE now on your own project data by downloading it from the AppSource.

Questions or remarks? Visit us at: https://visuals.novasilva.com/.

Advanced Linear Gauge by MAQ Software (NEW)

We are excited to introduce our newest Power BI custom visual: the Advanced Linear Gauge by MAQ Software.

In any industry, it is typical to establish goals before pursuing them. With this visual, you can monitor progress towards target values and conduct detailed analysis with the visual’s suite of basic and premium functionalities.

Key business uses:

Financial services: Track budget consumption against allocated budgets for the year or quarter.
Sales: Track daily or weekly progress against sales goals for the year or quarter.
Marketing: Track progress on impressions, views, and clickthrough against the marketing campaign targets.
Operations: Track daily output against daily or weekly goals.

Key features:

Customizable bars
Customizable axis labels, colors, fonts, etc.
Customizable labels for the data points
Ability to designate 1 set of values (5 in Premium) as the target for the categories
Tooltips to display additional information
Ability to plot an inner Comparison bar (Premium)
Color rules – automatically change the color of bars based on specified thresholds (Premium)
Connector lines – lines to align multiple targets within a single bar (Premium)
Customizable display ratio – change the display ratio of the bars and axis labels (Premium)

Figure 1: Sample graphs showcasing the comparison bar (top) and color rules feature (bottom) of the Advanced Linear Gauge custom visual.

Source: Microsoft

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Power BI June 2023 Feature Summary