Pragmatic Works Nerd News

September's Power BI Update | 2020

Written by Matt Peterson | Sep 29, 2020

It’s that time again for another update from Power BI.  If you like to read about the updates then below I give a brief summary of the features I really enjoy from this month.  If you want the full experience and would like to see the new features demoed for you then check out the video Devin and I made for this month right here ➡ September Power BI Updates. Devin and I hope this helps you along your Power BI journey.

This month has quite a few updates and here are the ones I enjoy the most.

Smart Narrative Visual

This new visual added to the desktop will analyze all the visuals on a report page and come up with insights.  These insights will be displayed as text in your visual.  I think of this visual being like a Sticky Note on steroids.  You can choose what text you want to keep, modify the text, and even add your own measures to this visual.  This is a preview feature so you have to turn this on under the File menu, options , and settings, preview features.

Q&A Supports Math

Yay!  You know I was a math teacher before I switched over to the BI world.  So I was ecstatic when I learned I could now ask my Q&A visual to do not just simple math operations, but even advanced operations.  I can ask Q&A to add two countries' profits on the fly and if I want to take it further I can even multiply that result by another number.  Think of you have a goal you want to reach for the next year and you want your sales to increase by 10%.  So this formula would need to honor the Order of Operations.  

Workspace Search

Hallelujah!  I am part of so many workspaces at my job and when I am ready to publish my reports I hate scrolling through all the workspaces to find the one I need.  Well, we now have the search capability for publishing to a workspace in the desktop.  Yeah, this is a minor update but sometimes it is the simple things in life that makes me happy.

 

If you want to see all of the updates check out our video below.