Microsoft Power BI Desktop – July 2021 Update

Do you want to have transparent and clear access to your company data - whether in your office or on the road? Then Microsoft Power BI is the right entry point for your business intelligence from the Microsoft Cloud. For the July update of Microsoft's business intelligence solution Power BI, some new features and previews have been made available.

Report generation

Small Multiples

Two feature improvements:

Improved keyboard navigation and screen reader support, and moving focus should now be more consistent and intuitive, and screen reader displays should now be labelled appropriately
A sorting function - this allows the sorting and thus the order of the "small multiples" to be adjusted

• Conditional formatting
• Extension of the "conditional formatting" options for more visuals:
• Colours of data labels
• Colours for totals rows
• Colours of legend descriptions
• Axis start and end
• Axis title, grid line and caption colours
• Colours of the visual percentage bar of the funnel visual
• Colour of the visual category axis of the funnel visual
• Multi-line map title text, data caption colours and category caption colours
• Gauge visual colours, including start, minimum and maximum
• Slicer slider and header font colours

Streaming Dataflows

The recently announced Streaming dataflows feature can now be tested in preview mode. This feature allows any business analyst to process streaming data with simple drag-and-drop functions and without code. Users can connect to, prepare and visualise real-time data to create end-to-end streaming analytics solutions directly in Power BI. Or as Microsoft describes it: "Customers want to work with data the moment it comes in, not days or weeks later. Our vision is simple - the differences between batch, real-time and streaming data will disappear. Customers should be able to work with all data as soon as it is available."

Other

Power BI Desktop Installer Customisation & WebView2

• The Power BI Desktop .exe installer will now attempt to download and install Microsoft Edge WebView2 as part of the installation process.
• WebView2 is not (yet) a prerequisite for using Power BI Desktop (if the installation of Microsoft Edge WebView2 fails for any reason - offline installation, etc. - Power BI Desktop can still be used without restrictions).
• Microsoft Edge WebView2 is the first step in the transition of part of Microsoft's infrastructure from CefSharp to WebView2.
• The transition will streamline the development and publishing process
• Microsoft Edge WebView2 must be installed on every client PC that uses Power BI Desktop
• There is currently no date for this transition from CefSharp to WebView2.
• WebView2 is already available as a "preview feature" and can be switched by activating the "Power BI Desktop Infrastructure Update". (the option only becomes visible once WebView2 has been installed and Power BI Desktop has been restarted).

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