Power BI Update | February 2020

Power BI recently released their February 2020 update, with some exciting new features. We’ve picked out the most interesting features for accounting firms and summarised them below.

Incremental refreshing is now generally available

Previously in Power BI, pulling in historical data would require refreshing the entire dataset. To report on productivity over the last five years would require hundreds of thousands of timesheet entries.

The new general availability of incremental refreshing in Power BI Pro now allows you to store anything older than say, 60 days, and refresh anything more recent.

Additionally, the incremental refresh allows you to only refresh rows that have changed since the last refresh, cutting down refresh times even further.

Hierarchical slicer (preview)

Power BI has now added the ability to have multiple fields present on a single slicer. This provides a way for more granularity in selections, rather than using multiple slicers. For example, we can now group all matters relating to a service offering, improving end-users’ ability to customise the report.

Custom Format Strings

A small improvement here that will make life easier is the ability to change the custom format string through the ribbon, a source of major frustration when trying to get values, especially dates and currencies, to format correctly.

For more information about the features released in the February 2020 Power BI update, click here.

If you would like some assistance with Power BI reporting or using these new features to get more out of your firm reporting, feel free to get in contact with us.