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What's New in the Power BI Service

Written by Pragmatic Works | Dec 17, 2019

Do you want to learn what's new in the Power BI Service? In a recent webinar, Nick Lee, gives a look at Power BI's latest features, customization options, and how to utilize the ‘New Look’ tool, as well as some Power BI features you may not know about or not know how to use yet.

The webinar starts off with the PBI Service’s new look including a demo. Not only is there a new look but there are also some new features available such as new metadata to view, a new way to navigate between pages of a report with a vertical pane, a simplified action bar making it easier to navigate and a new filters experience. 

Next, you’ll learn about new refresh options (with a demo). Cloud based Power BI files or datasets have not needed a gateway to get refreshed for a while although many may not be aware of this. Not having to have a gateway set up will surely make your life easier, so this is a good thing to know.

Also, OneDrive files that are saved to the cloud and synced with your PC automatically update as changes are made or at least once per hour by your Power BI tenant. Do note that does not mean your data gets refreshed once per hour but your local files.

An option for refreshing our datasets automatically is Power Automate (formerly Flow). For instance, every time a new row or item in a SharePoint list gets updated, it triggers a flow to refresh that dataset instead of having to schedule a refresh. Something to note here is you are limited to a certain number of refreshes if you have a Power BI Pro license rather than a Premium. Some new Premium capacity settings will also be discussed.

Lastly, the webinar will cover a couple bookmark changes in the Service; personal bookmarks, as well as the somewhat controversial change of ALL bookmarks in a report being visible to everyone.

So, if you’d like to learn about what’s new in the Power BI Service, this webinar is for you. You can watch the complete webinar below. To view the presentation slides, click here.

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