Issue 249: 12th March 2024
This week there have been a few announcements: some big news for Excel + Power BI users is that the creation of connected tables in Excel Online is available in Excel Online for everyone. We've also been told about the Improved image mode in Power BI add-in for PowerPoint, and we've been given the On-premises data gateway February 2024 release which includes a new feature around SQL Trusted Servers.
Issue 248: 5th March 2024
This week we've had a few more announcements. Firstly is the the announcement around the retirement of legacy Power BI Apps (pre-audiences) (honestly I hadn't realized they'd branded pre-audience apps as "Legacy"). We've also been given a summary of the Updates and enhancements for reference labels including a handful of new improvements, and we've been told about the New Data Connectors for Excel and CSV for Report Creation in Fabric.
Issue 247: 27th February 2024
A flurry of announcements came shortly after last week's edition, and it's not really stopped since. First and foremost, we were provided with the Power BI February 2024 Feature Summary which contained some huge announcements. The most significant being that of Visual calculations (preview), a new way of writing DAX formulas that are scoped to a visual and make common calculations (such as cumulative sums/rolling averages) much simpler. A number of people have written about it this week, so I suggest you check them out. The next significant update (which also warranted its own blog post) is that of TMDL in Power BI Desktop developer mode (Preview), which, if enabled, replaces TMSL as the file format/syntax representing your semantic model definition when utilizing .pbip
(Power BI Project) files. This is another huge step towards making Power BI Desktop files more accessible and extensible from a scripting perspective.
Issue 246: 20th February 2024
We're still awaiting the first Power BI feature summary of the year, but from what I can tell from chat on social media, it's going to include some pretty cool features (around TMDL and Visual Calcs). The new version of Power BI Desktop has actually already been released, so you may already be using it without knowing! Anyway, I'll leave details until the official blog has been released. So onto this week's updates. There have been a few Improvements for creating new Direct Lake semantic models (note: not the default semantic model), and we can now use Copilot to Generate measure descriptions (preview) (an even easier way of documenting your model!) Elsewhere this week, Alberto Ferrari has described Optimizing time intelligence in DirectQuery, and Nandan Hegde has described how to Refresh Power BI Semantic Model from MSFT Fabric Data Pipeline (while we wait for a native Power BI refresh activity).
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