Power BI Weekly Issue 252: 2nd April 2024
As the dust settles on SQLBits and FabCon, we can now reflect on the vast swathe of new Fabric announcements and their impact (if any) on our businesses. I shared Arun's main blog last week: Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, but if a wall of words isn't for you, it might be easier looking through the latest posts on the Fabric blog to get an idea of the top-level updates and announcements. The main announcements impacting Power BI users, in my opinion, would be
- Announcing Folder in Workspace in Public Preview - Folders for Fabric artifacts! Although currently
.pbixfiles have to be manually uploaded to a target folder. (Apparently publishing to a folder from Power BI Desktop will arrive in the next few months.) - Announcing the Public Preview of Database Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric - Mirroring automatically replicates your database data into your tenant's OneLake. Currently only supported for Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB and Snowflake.
- Get data with Power Query available in Power BI Report Builder (Preview) - Paginated Reports can now connect to hundreds of data sources using the Power Query Editor we know and love from Power BI Desktop.
Elsewhere this week, Carly Newsome has joined Adam at GuyInACube to discuss Copilot for Power BI: Your Ultimate Copilot Guide, Alberto Ferrari has continued the visual calculations series with Introducing EXPAND and COLLAPSE for visual calculations in Power BI, and Reid Havens has explained the difference between Explosion Vs Erosion for Stacked Charts in Power BI.
Data Prep
Covering: Power Query (M), Dataflows, Data connectors, AI Insights
- Rick de Groot (@Rickmaurinus) highlights the release of the new book: The Definitive Guide to Power Query M
- On the Power BI blog, Nirupama Srinivasan (@MSPowerBI) explains how to Get data with Power Query available in Power BI Report Builder (Preview)
- Chris Webb (@cwebb_bi) covers Power BI Paginated Reports That Connect To Web Services And Excel
- Chandeep Chhabra (@chandeep2786) explains how to Connect Excel / CSV files from SharePoint to Excel or Power BI
- Fowmy Abdulmuttalib (@ExcelFort) writes about Enhanced Data Profiling in Power Query: GUI and Table.Profile Function with 2nd Argument
- Paul Turley (@paul_turley) covers Power BI Direct Lake and DirectQuery in the Age of Fabric
- Michael Kovalsky writes about Direct Lake Migration
- Luca Liu describes Two ways to Union Tables - DAX and Power Query
Data Modeling
Covering: DAX (Measures & Calculated Tables/Columns), Relationships, Analysis Services, Composite models
- Chandeep Chhabra (@chandeep2786) describes How to Create a Bridge Table for Many to Many Relationships
- On the Enterprise DNA blog, Enterprise Dna Experts (@EnterpriseDNA) explain How to Use Switch True Logic in Power BI
- Antriksh Sharma (@AntrikshShar) provides a CALCULATE Deep Dive
Report Authoring and Interactivity
Covering: Layout and formatting, Visualizations, Interactivity, Themes, Mobile reports, Dashboards
- On the SQLBI blog, Alberto Ferrari (@FerrariAlberto) introduces EXPAND and COLLAPSE for visual calculations in Power BI
- Reid Havens (@HavensBI) describes Explosion Vs Erosion for Stacked Charts in Power BI
- Xinyi X covers How to use Tooltip to display breakdown data for a specified ranking
- On the Learning Science YouTube channel, Learning Science describes How to dynamically change the values of the X axis and Y axis in a chart in Power BI
Deployment, Security and Operations
Covering: Workspaces and Apps, Template Apps, Deployment Pipelines, Gateways, Security, Sharing, Licences, Admin operations, Developer Tooling
- Patrick Leblanc (@GuyInACube) discusses Exploring Dynamic Subscriptions for Power BI reports
- Philipp Lenz (@lenz_philipp) writes about Dynamic subscriptions with email in Power BI / paginated reports – Part 2
- On the Purple Frog Systems blog, Tom Owen (@PurpleFrogSys) describes Deployment Pipelines in Power BI and Fabric
General
Covering: Cross-topic announcements & feature summaries, Whitepapers, Community events, Learning Resources & Certifications, Podcasts, Sample reports, End-to-end walkthroughs
- Adam Saxton (@GuyInACube) talks about Copilot for Power BI: Your Ultimate Copilot Guide (with Carly Newsome)
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