(Shared via Microsoft’s Power BI Blog) Successful organizations have continued to engage in data transformation to remain viable in an increasingly digital world. As a result, businesses are producing vast amounts of data and need the best business intelligence solutions to extract insights for critical decision-making. Microsoft Power BI helps users collect, visualize, and analyze enormous amounts of essential business information using immersive graphs and charts. As Power BI continues to evolve, Tallan has you covered for what matters most to businesses. Here’s a brief overview of what’s new so far in 2022!
January
Microsoft kicked off the new year with a promising rundown of invaluable updates for businesses of all sizes. Notable updates included revamped bookmarks navigators, new sorting options and pie/donut chart rotations.
Page & Bookmark Navigators
Setting up a page or bookmark navigation experience in a report used to take a lengthy period of time because developers had to put up each individual button for each page or bookmark and then replicate each button if they wanted to present a different state. Microsoft unveiled two new built-in navigators in January’s release, which allowed designers to easily build page and bookmark navigation experiences with just a few clicks.
Sort Legend
Users gained the helpful ability to adjust the sort direction for items in legends. They can be changed by accessing the visual header’s context menu and selecting the field and sort direction in the sort legend flyout. This will also aid in reordering data in visualizations such as stacked column charts, as well as determining which lines or sections in other Cartesian charts are presented on top of others. Click here for the full list of January updates.
February
In February, Microsoft announced a variety of new and highly anticipated features such as new mobile formatting options, Dynamic M Query Parameters support for more data sources, and deployment pipeline enhancements. See the full list here.
Mobile Formatting Options
After months of development, Microsoft made it possible for users to format visuals in mobile layout and to have those formatting changes affect only the mobile-optimized view. As part of Power BI Desktop’s February update, Microsoft announced the public preview of this significant improvement to the mobile-optimized report authoring experience.
Mandatory Label Policy
Organizations can use mandatory label policies to ensure that MIP sensitivity labels are applied to new content published in or submitted to Power BI. This feature is now widely available as of February 2022. When users attempt to save a PBIX file in Power BI Desktop or a Power BI artifact in the service that doesn’t have a sensitivity label applied, they’ll be requested to select one before the item is saved. When an obligatory label policy is in effect, the option to delete a label is also unavailable.
Microsoft unveiled two new built-in navigators in January’s release, which allowed designers to easily build page and bookmark navigation experiences with just a few clicks.
March
Last month, Microsoft announced error bars for line charts and dynamic format strings support for all chart elements were announced, in addition to updates to the Azure Maps visual and Sensitivity labels, datasets hub, and Power BI Goals.
Error Bars
Users can now display the uncertainty in their data by adding error bars to line charts. Uncertainty is a significant feature of data, particularly in scientific professions and other fields where the displayed value of a point must be contextualized by the range of possible values. Users may now select upper and lower bounds for the data on their line chart and personalize how the uncertainty is visualized on a chart with this new feature.
BitSight Security Ratings
BitSight is a security ratings company that provides detailed information on a company’s cybersecurity effectiveness. BitSight for Security Success Management (SPM) allows CISOs to track, manage, and report on the performance of their cybersecurity programs over time, as well as foster a common awareness of cyber risk across their business. This connection makes it simple for businesses to import BitSight data into Microsoft Power BI for analysis and dashboard development. The dashboarding and analysis created in PowerBI can then be used for executive reporting, tracking remediation progress, combining BitSight data with other security data sources to get a more complete picture of their cybersecurity program’s performance over time, and helping stakeholders understand cyber risk, among other things.
We’re thrilled to share that Microsoft has been named a Magic Quadrant Leader in analytics and BI platforms by Gartner for the fourth year in a row! Click here to view the report.
Tallan’s Hartford Power BI User Group was held on March 24th, with a focus on Power BI Governance. Our team presented a demo of custom reports based on Power BI Content Metadata, and Power BI Usage Metrics pulled from the Power BI APIs. As part of the discussion, we also explored innovative ways of keeping this data up to date and went more in-depth on the February and March updates mentioned above. Click here to watch the full recap or visit our events page to register for the next Hartford Power BI User Group (date TBA).