Power BI Weekly

Issue #234 - 21st November 2023

You'll probably be aware that last week was the Microsoft Ignite conference, which was, well - eventful! If you missed it, here's the Book of news, and all the sessions can be streamed on-demand now. Naturally, the main news in the analytical space was the GA of Microsoft Fabric workloads, which came alongside a swathe of announcements that can all be found on the Microsoft Fabric blog. One of the main new features being that of Mirroring (which was originally highlighted in Arun's blog Prepare your data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric) which replicates your database data (from its proprietary format) into Delta tables in Fabric. So, like shortcuts but to your database data. Pretty cool, but (as is a bit of a theme with Fabric announcements) it's not available to use yet - you have to apply for the early adopter programme.

More specifically to Power BI, Kim Manis shared the blog: Empower Power BI users with Microsoft Fabric and Copilot giving a summary of the main Power BI-related announcements. On the Copilot front, you'll have probably seen the videos from Microsoft Build earlier this year where Copilot automatically creates full reports for you, including measures, chart design, Smart Narratives (now re-branded as "Narrative with Copilot") etc. Unfortunately this is initially only available to those using P1/F64 or above SKUs, and is being rolled out in stages lasting until March 2024. We've also been told about the support for Direct Lake on Synapse Data Warehouses (woohoo), the integration of import-mode semantic models with OneLake, and many other announcements.

If that wasn't enough, we've also been given the Power BI November 2023 Feature Summary, which includes information about the New button slicer, the New card’s reference labels and the new Explore feature, all in Public Preview. As ever, this update comes alongside a walkthrough video, which you can find here: Power BI Update - November 2023 if you'd rather sit and watch!