By Luke Sisley, Senior Business Intelligence Analyst, CSL
This month’s Power BI update introduces deduplication rules for composite models on Power BI datasets and analysis services, developments of the calendar view on date picker as well as some useful data warehousing developments and some helpful changes to Power BI dashboards in terms of efficient options when developing the dashboards. We’re always grateful of updates that mean less time spent navigating the settings!
Our main highlights are below. As with previous updates, any new features in preview, means you will need to ensure you’ve selected ‘Preview Features’ in the Options & Settings menu pane.
Reporting
Deduplication rules for composite models on Power BI Datasets and Analysis Services
This update allows better organisation of tables in a dashboard on desktop, anyone viewing dashboards from the service or app won’t be able to see this implementation.
If using composite models on Power BI datasets and analysis services, it’s easy to get into a situation where tables and measure names have duplicate names and are not unique. It is now possible to apply a name disambiguation rule to a source in a composite model when you anticipate name conflicts with tables or measures from another source. Text can now be added as a prefix or suffix to table names, measure names or both. Additionally, you can choose to add that text only when a duplication occurs or if you prefer, have it added all the time.
For example if one source you are combining is about marketing and the other is about sales. You can now set up a deduplication rule on the source connection so the ‘Customer’ table from the marketing source is named ‘Customer (marketing)’:
These options are under Settings in the dialog that shows when setting up the composite model connection to a Power BI dataset or Analysis Services model:
After the connections and deduplication rule have been set up, the field list will show both ‘Customer’ and ‘Customer (marketing)’ according to the deduplication rule set up:
Visualisations
Date Picker by Powerviz
The date picker calendar view has developed a much better user interface for filtering on date selection, namely the ability to pick multiple date selections.
This will allow the user to exclude a period where, say, a brand was out of stock, in order to better understand their sales data.
Additionally, if looking at sales force performance you could exclude a period where an account manager was on annual leave. It is possible to select multiple relevant periods when interrogating data on the dashboard.
The new calendar view also looks cleaner and is easier to select the period wanted without the difficulty of the toggle line or having to click multiple months/weeks in the drop down.
Check out the video – Introducing Date Picker by Powerviz.
To Wrap Up The Power BI Update October 2023
That wraps up our summary on the key points of interest delivered with this month’s update. You can find the full summary here.
For support in getting the most out of Power BI, please call us on 01483 528302 or email info@csl-uk.com, or read more about how our Power BI experts can support you here.
