CSL, 30 January 2024
Due to the holidays, Microsoft had said that they would not publish a monthly feature summary in January.
Instead they have began the new year with the first release of Power BI Report Server, January 2024 Feature Summary. Key highlights include extended data labels, more styling options, which improves aesthetics for column and bar charts, and show visuals as tables.
Reporting
Extended customisation for Data Labels
There are some new enhanced capabilities for Data Labels, giving extended customisation choices. This includes a couple of extra details for the X-axis. Previously only the label of the used measure could be displayed.
It is now also possible to replace grouped bar charts, by only displaying the measure. (Ex: instead of showing value 2022 and value 2023 as 2 bars. We can now show Value 2023 as a bar and the growth as label.)
Finally, this new enhancement is a better way of showing data that we usually put in a tooltip when hovering over the chart.
These new features of Data Labels significantly enhances the data density in charts.
Show visuals as tables
Microsoft is introducing a new view mode called Show visuals as tables which displays report visuals in a tabular format with a single action. The current way of showing data as a table is by expanding a specific chart using the ‘focus mode’ function. The disadvantage of that is you can only see 1 chart as a time as a table format.
This update totally changes this, and we can now just switch the chart without going into focus mode between chart and table while still looking at the rest of the dashboard.
To activate this view mode, navigate to the view dropdown menu and select Show visuals as tables.
Then use keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + F11 to toggle between the two views.
A lot of clients use the ‘show as table’ function so this will be a nice new feature to incorporate.
More styling options for column and bar charts
Finally, there are numerous new formatting enhancements for column and bar charts in Power BI. These additions are designed to improve data visualisation, enabling more impactful analysis and storytelling capabilities, example below.
These extra styling options really depend on client’s view of it – some might not like it, some might. So this feature will be much more dependent on client’s preferences.
To Wrap Up The Power BI Report Update January 2024
That wraps up our summary on the key points of interest delivered with this month’s Report update. You can find the full summary here.
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