Power BI Weekly

Issue #231 - 31st October 2023

No Power BI-specific announcements this week, but one that's closely related on the Fabric side is the release of Data Activator in Public Preview. This feature allows you to create alerts on standard Power BI report visuals when they meet a certain pattern or condition, and then take action correspondingly - either by sending emails/Teams messages, or hooking up to a custom Power Automate flow. See Tom Martens' blog on this for a real example: Select, Detect, Act, or why I consider Reflex being a watchdog or check out the polished Microsoft Mechanics video on the topic, presented by Will Thompson: Automate data-driven actions | Data Activator in Microsoft Fabric. Sticking to the Fabric-Power BI theme, Sandeep Pawar has shared a new tool: Measure Maze: Visualizing Measure Dependencies Using Semantic Link & Network Analysis, providing an insight into the dependency trees of the measures in your Power BI dataset using the new SemPy package under the covers. And for those that rely on Power BI's integration with Log Analytics, Chris Webb has highlighted the New HostProperties Data In The ApplicationContext Column In Power BI Log Analytics which allows you to retrieve information about the consumption method via which report consumers have been viewing the report (e.g. Power BI Web App, Power BI Teams Personal App). Quite useful if you're wanting to understand how/where people are consuming certain reports!

Final reminder that I'm presenting at the Oxford Microsoft Data Platform Group tomorrow evening at 18:30 GMT, showcasing an End-to-End Solution in Microsoft Fabric for Data Engineers. Hope to see you there!