By Scott Bryson, BI Developer, CSL
Power BI Update
Overview
Microsoft has recently released their February 2021 round of updates inline with their monthly release schedule. Below I have pulled some of the more interesting points from this release.
Just remember to enable any preview features in Power BI desktop settings to be able to see some of these.
Lots of the updates this month are pushing features from preview to generally available but there are a couple of new features I will touch on.
Before I get into the highlight this month there has been a branding change:
You will all be familiar with the old logo, shown opposite.
This has been changed to the below; which you may have seen when opening Power BI desktop. This has now been carried over to the entire suite of tools.
Here are the highlights:
Reporting
Search Bar
An improvement to the new desktop ribbon is the addition of a search bar. Whilst this sounds simple it is something that has been missing from Power BI. You can use this in the same way you would any search bar, to help you navigate the tool for the harder to find commands and options.
You will get suggestions as soon as you click into the search bar before you even type, which are based on the current state of your report.
There is more info on this included in the full release which is linked at the bottom of this summary.
Colour Picker
The colour picker has been changed to allow you to enter an RGB value in addition to a HEX value, again a small change but allows a different way of working.
New filter operations: “is empty” and “is not empty”
Another one that sounds simple but can have a big impact! When filtering text you can now choose “is empty” and “is not empty”
The operation is empty shows items when the value is an empty string (“”).
The operation is not empty shows items when the value is not an empty string (“”).
This will be extremely useful when filtering text and allows you to handle text better in Power BI if the option isn’t there to deal with it at source.
Data connectivity
Visualizations
New Visualizations
New this month are:
- Shielded HTML Viewer by Nova Silva
- Zebra BI Tables (version 4.5)
- Zebra BI Charts (version 4.5)
- ValQ 2.0 Released with Connected and Collaborative Planning Features
- Drill Down Combo PRO by ZoomCharts
As is usually the case with the added visuals, these are from third party companies and may come with an additional charge for usage.
To Wrap It Up
For a full list, including any feature I did not touch on, here’s the official announcement
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-february-2021-feature-summary/
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.
