It's the Build conference this week, and many of you may already be aware that there are some pretty huge announcements on the Power BI front. Yesterday, the (now) announced Datamarts feature started trickling into some tenants, with initial impressions assuming it's a combined data prep and model authoring experience built-in to the Power BI Service. This is pretty much it - essentially Datamarts brings together Dataflows and Data modeling, with a managed SQL DB behind the scenes powering everything. So you ingest your data as usual from various sources using Power Query, then create relationships/measures/calculated tables etc using the model authoring experience. What's more is that you'll get a SQL endpoint to query the underlying data, but they'll also generate an automatic Power BI dataset based on the Datamart. A very compelling argument to keep the simpler workloads within Power BI - again, reducing complexity and lowering the barrier to entry for many users. What a brilliant feature! Take a look at the demo of it here: Add Data at Scale | Datamarts in Power BI.

Another amazing feature that may not get the limelight is the new Power BI integration for PowerPoint. That's right - embed Power BI reports into your slide deck and interact with them during your presentation. Wow! Elsewhere, we've also been told that Goals in Power BI is becoming ‘metrics’ and is moving to GA (Microsoft does love a good rename), and we've been told about the preview of Exportable Formatted Data Tables (which must still be being rolled out to tenants, because I can't yet see that option!) For all the other announcements living in the shadow of Datamarts, view Arun's blog here: Democratize enterprise analytics with Microsoft Power BI.