March Update

March has been an exciting month for the Power BI community. With promises from Microsoft’s Data Insights Summit coming into fruition, Power BI has many new and auspicious features just waiting to be utilized by the Power BI community. Two updates have been released this month, one in regards to Power BI Desktop and the other for PowerBI.com

Power BI Desktop

Report View:

  • Ability to publish reports to a Group Space in Power BI Service
  • Reports respect Do Not Summarize model setting from SSAS MD

Data Modeling:

  • Ability to change the datatype of a column when in DirectQuery mode
  • Ability to assume Referential Integrity on relationships in Direct Query
  • DirectQuery for Oracle and Teradata moves out of preview

Data Connectivity:

  • SAP BW Connector (Preview)
  • R Scripts connector
  • Support for Command Timeout in the UX
  • Setting to disable Privacy Level prompts at machine level
  • New Transformations:Remove Blanks via Column Filter menuConvert Duration values to YearsKeep Duplicates
  • Support for whitespace and line feeds in Query Editor preview
  • Navigator enhancements:Ability to disable preview from NavigatorTechnical name support
  • Load: Auto-step to disambiguate conflicting column names
  • Rename queries directly from Queries pane.
  • Smartsheet connector GA

Power BI Service

Here is a list of the new features added to the Power BI Service (PowerBI.com) in March 2016.

Dashboards:

  • Featured dashboard
  • Filter dashboard list

Enterprise features:

  • Admin Usage Reporting
  • Row-level Security
  • Disable exporting data

Q&A:

  • Auto complete for “is”

Mobile:

  • KPIs on your Apple Watch

Excel:

  • Analyze in Excel

Other:

  • Power BI in Australia
  • Language Settings

For more information about a particular feature, click here.