Exciting Power BI Announcements from Microsoft's Data Insights Summit

Did you miss the announcements from this week’s Data Insights Summit hosted by Microsoft in Seattle? There were so many exciting announcements and features. Luckily, our President of Consulting, Adam Jorgensen, looked through them all and put together Pragmatic Works top 10 game changing Power BI and Microsoft BI announcements.

1.  Power BI has more data connectors than any other BI platform in the world! Yes, you heard it right, the world. If you’ve got to connect to data or move your data around, Power BI is by far the platform to you want to use.

2.  Power BI’s planet scale. Power BI is running in every Microsoft data center globally. No matter where you are or where your data takes you, Power BI is there, ready to collaborate and support all your data initiatives.

3.  Certified and HIPAA compliant. Power BI and Microsoft Azure are the most compliant, certified platforms across the planet. Azure is hands down the most secure cloud. This gives you confidence that your data is in the cloud with the most protection and compliance capabilities of any platform.

4.  Integration with Microsoft Teams. Pragmatic Works has been piloting this integration and using Microsoft Teams to manage our projects and communicate better with our teams. We have Power BI workspaces embedded in those teams so teams can do project reporting. We’ve found this to be an incredible way to communicate, collaborate and share data reports and dashboards all in one place.

5.  Visio-diagram flow control. With this you can take visio-diagram and map your Power BI visuals to that visual flow and have shapes on the visio-diagram tied to different Power BI components. You can take everything from floor plans to engineering diagrams to workflow design and map that data using custom visualizations and new integration with Power BI.

6.  Real-time write back capabilities. This has always been a challenge, even in analysis services. Now with Power Apps, you can provide visuals with real-time write back into Power BI.

7.  “What If” parameters. You’re able to get interactive valuations that are referenceable in DAX formulas so you can do “What If” scenario analysis right in Power BI, without having to move it into Excel.

8.  Book Marks. Use this to save your place in different reports. Using the context and filter features that come with Power BI to have reports preselected and preaggregated for how you, and your team, wants to look at reports across the enterprise.

9.  Q & A on the phone. With this, you have a user interface, like a text messaging app, where you can ask questions directly of your data. You get the natural language Q & A capabilities of Cortana and AI on your smart phone. Very cool.

10.  Quick Insights using built-in AI. You can use Microsoft BI to analyze changes in trends and data to look for correlations and causations, and suggest those. How awesome is that? No other BI platform on the planet can do this!

If you want to get Power BI into your organization and take advantage of the benefits it brings to your data culture, or if you’ve got Power BI but you’re not sure how to get it going, Pragmatic Works can help. Our consulting services can take you from where you are to where you want to be with the help of the best BI platform in the world, Microsoft Power BI.