Several new features have been made available for the April update of Microsoft's business intelligence solution Power BI.
Power Automate in Power BI
With the Power Automate visual, automatic workflows can now be configured and operated directly in Power BI reports. One of the highlights is the dynamic interaction between Power BI and Power Automate. This means that when the workflow is executed, the dynamic contents of the Power BI report are taken into account, such as filters.
This gives users the ability in Power BI not only to consume and react to the reports, but to act and be active based on their own insights.
Example:
Creating a Power Automate workflow in Power BI - here: Sending a status email - with reference to the data in the Power BI report:
Implementation of workflow activation in the Power BI report with filter and article reference:
4. item is delivered late - info
5. item is delivered earlier - info
6. Power BI filter
7. item reference
Result of the workflow - email to appropriate recipient:
8. subject (see configuration; picture 1)
9. article reference (see configuration; picture 1)
New and improved shapes
Users can now choose from a much wider variety of shapes to make the reports even more individual.
Now in this release we’ve added a lot more shapes to choose from:
In addition to new formatting options such as text options, rounded edges for rounded corners, shape drop shadow effects, shape glow effects and shape and text rotation, there is also a new default style for the fill colour, outline colour and outline weight of shapes.
If you have existing shapes in your older report, you can convert them to the new shape design by selecting the shape and clicking Convert in the Format Shape area. You can also select and convert multiple shapes at once by holding down the Ctrl key.
Easy sharing of reports via links will be released at the end of the month and will allow reports to be shared via links in addition to direct access sharing.
Furthermore, automatic table recognition from Excel files is now generally available. Excel is one of the most commonly used data sources for reporting and analysis.
A typical challenge when extracting data from Excel files is that the data is often not formatted as tables, so it can be extremely difficult and time-consuming for users to "collect" relevant data from an Excel table. When using the Excel Connector, this function automatically identifies sections of each Excel spreadsheet to be extracted into a table and displays them in the Navigator under the "Suggested Tables" group.
These are just some of the new features, you can find more on the Microsoft Power BI blog and summarised in this video:
Would you like to learn more about Power BI or do you have any questions? Our experts will be happy to help you.
TSO-DATA
Jan Grundmann
bi[at]tso[dot]de
+49(541) 1395-747
