.png)
Last month's Power BI update sees the new format pane move into general availability, some updates to error bars & a few exciting new features available in the Power BI service to extract even more value from your data!
New format pane now generally available
This month the new format pane became generally available, and is now deployed to the Power BI service! Whilst this feature is now generally available, the Power BI team continues to incorporate feedback into each month's release. The following improvements have been made this month:
Fixed a blocking bug to ensure the analytics pane works for custom visuals where applicable.
Fixed a bug that removed the log scale applied to the horizontal axis. This affected line, area, stacked area, combo, or scatter charts set prior to April 2022 reports.
When changing a blank page to tooltip size, the “allow use as tooltip” toggle is flicked on to save a step!
Updates to error bars (Preview)
This month the Power BI team have revamped the error bars card in the Analytics pane to simplify the structure of the formatting options. With fewer sub-cards to scroll through, it is easier to find and customise the various elements of the error bars. The major changes are that line options have now been moved into the Error band sub card, and marker options have also now moved into the bar and band cards.
Improvements to table navigation
This month, there have been several enhancements to the table visual for existing and new reports to improve performance, usability, and accessibility for all users.
These updates include:
Overall performance improvements for scrolling and rendering, as well as the look and feel of grid lines and selection styles
New keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation, including SHIFT UP/DOWN ARROW to select multiple contiguous rows, PAGE UP/DOWN for scrolling, and HOME/END to move focus to the first/last cell in the current row
Enhanced row selection experience that includes a left indicator and improved contrast to help distinguish selected rows from non-selected rows
A new two-toned focus outline so on any colour background, the focus will always be visible even on darker themes meeting colour contrast requirements
Updated conditional formatting icons that are conformant with colour contrast requirements and now announces alternative text with screen readers
The ability to associate images with alternative (alt) text in the formatting pane to describe images to blind and low vision users
Data Storytelling with Power BI
Power BI Data storytelling is a PowerPoint add-in developed by the Power BI team, which lets you add Power BI reports into PowerPoint slides and enjoy the delightful interactive experience of Power BI inside your presentations. With data storytelling, data will always be up to date in your slides, whether you’re building a presentation or presenting it live to others.
This month the team have enabled storytelling starting points inside the Power BI report experience, making it easy and simple for you to get started with storytelling directly from the report you want to use in your presentation.
First, open the report you wish to add to your presentation, navigate to the desired page, and make any data selection that reflects the view you want to use.
Then, click Share > PowerPoint or Export > PowerPoint > Embed live data.
Check the “Embed report with data filters you selected” box if you want to make sure that the same report state will be added to the presentation.
This will open a new window, with two options:
Option 1: copy the link and paste it into a Power BI add-in you added to an existing presentation.
Option 2: open a new presentation with the report automatically added to it and continue to build your presentation.
Read this blog to learn more on how you can enhance PowerPoint storytelling with data by including Power BI reports directly into a presentation with just a few clicks.
Introducing the Data hub
The Data hub is the evolution of the Datasets Hub that was announced in December 2020. The Data hub is a central location for data owners, report creators, and report consumers to manage, discover and reuse data items across all workspaces.
Data item owners can see usage metrics, refresh status, related reports, lineage, and impact analysis to help monitor and manage their data items.
Report creators can use the hub to find suitable items to build their reports on and use links to easily create the reports.
Report consumers can use the hub to find reports based on trustworthy data items.
The Data hub is designed to eliminate issues caused by users building similar datasets repeatedly, resulting in resource overload, governance complexity, and difficulty in identifying sources of truth.
The Data hub addresses these challenges by making it easier for users to discover existing, quality data and reuse it to answer business questions and gain insights.
Once you discover a data item that seems to have the right data, a click on the item opens the data details page. On the details page you can see the following:
Metadata about the data item, including description, endorsement, and sensitivity label.
Actions such as share, refresh, create new, and more.
Related reports (reports that were built on top of the dataset)
When thinking about data discovery best practices, before creating new reports, users should look at the existing related reports. If there are no such reports that are suitable, there are multiple ways to create a new report:
Create a report from a template, if a template has been defined (a template is defined by adding the suffix “(template)” to a report built on top of the dataset).
Create a report from scratch to open a blank canvas and start creating your report.
Auto-create a report. Note: This is currently supported only for single-table datasets. Moving forward, we’ll be adding support for datasets with multiple tables.
Create a formatted table. Read more about this new functionality.
Data hub in Power BI Desktop
Power BI report creators primarily use Power BI Desktop to build new content and then publish it to the Power BI service.
When building new reports, instead of connecting to external data sources, the best practice is to connect to curated data available to them in Power BI.
With the Data hub, users can find datasets, filter and search to find the data they need, and then connect to create a report.
For the rest of the Power BI June 2022 update, click here, or if you would like to discuss Power BI for your business, email info@pt20.com.au or give us a call on +61 746 596 700.