Reporting

Enhancements to mobile authoring

In this release we are introducing an improved mobile layout authoring experience and additional mobile layout capabilities. As the Power BI mobile apps have increasingly been adopted by more and more organizations, we have received feedback asking for more capabilities and improvements for the mobile authoring experience. We hope that the enhancements introduced in this release will help you more easily build compelling, interactive reports optimized for mobile devices.

 

Here are the new experiences and capabilities that will help you build mobile-optimized reports:

• New phone emulator
• Updated visualization pane
• Support for overlaid visuals

New phone emulator

One of the first things you may notice about the new experience is that the phone emulator or phone canvas has been revamped. A fine-grained grid gives you more flexibility in resizing and placing visuals, and a longer canvas allows you to add more visuals to your page.

Updated visualization pane

You may also notice that the Visualizations pane has been improved too. Now, you can find your desired visual by looking for its name, and you can also easily differentiate between hidden and shown visuals.

Support for overlaid visuals

Another improvement is that you can now place one visual on top of another. This lets you use the same design techniques used in the web layout for building interactive reports using bookmarks. You can also create beautiful reports by layering visuals over images.

To start designing a mobile-optimized report, go to View > Mobile layout, and drag and drop your visuals onto the canvas. Start creating amazing mobile-optimized reports today and let us know what you think. We strive to continuously improve and enhance this area, and we greatly appreciate any feedback as to what you liked about the update and how you think we can improve it! Check out our blog to learn more.

Automatic page refresh is now generally available

Back in October 2019 we introduced automatic page refresh, which allows you to set the refresh interval of visuals in your report when using a Direct Query source. For fast updating sources, this near real-time experience allows consumers to monitor time-critical reports and ensure that they are always viewing the latest data. Later, in April 2020, we added the option to perform page refreshes with change detection for Premium capacities, allowing you to have a lightweight query that runs in the background to check if data has changed and only refresh your entire report page if a change has been detected.

With this release, we are excited to announce the general availability of this capability, including fully supporting any interval and settings in Power BI Desktop. When publishing to the Power BI service remember that the following restrictions apply:

• Automatic page refresh: supported in both Pro and Premium. Pro has a minimum refresh interval of 30 min. and Premium has default minimum of 5 minutes. In the case of Premium, capacity admins can turn the feature on/off and increase or reduce the interval allowed. The fastest refresh possible is 1 second.
• Change detection measure: only supported in Premium. Default minimum in Premium is 5 seconds. Capacity admins can turn the feature on/off and increase or reduce the interval allowed. The fastest interval possible is 1 second. Only one change detection measure is allowed per model.
• Both capabilities are enabled by default with the interval minimums described previously.
• Performance analyzer in Desktop: change detection measure show up in the performance analyzer for authors to optimize the measure itself. Automatic page refresh queries show up as visuals refreshing every interval set up by the author.
• Capacity metrics app: all queries generated by these capabilities show up in the capacity metrics apps to be tracked and take action if needed. In the near future we will be adding the capability to filter by type of query.

To start using the new refresh types for Direct Query, make sure you connect to a supported source, and head to the page format pane to find page refresh:

• Automatic page refresh: enable the toggle, select Auto page refresh and define a duration for your refresh.
• Change detection: add a new change detection measure or select an existing one going to the change detection dialog in the Modeling section of the ribbon, right clicking on the field list and selecting change detection, or head to formatting pane for that page and select change detection.

And as always, if you have any feedback about automatic page refresh and change detection, we would love to hear from you.

Hierarchical slicer is now generally available

In February, we released a preview of the hierarchical slicer, and this month, we are excited to announce that the feature is now generally available.

With this release it includes several improvements:

• New options for expand/collapse icons
• Icons now scale with font size
• Ability to customize indentation for child items
• Supported with AI visuals

New options for expand/collapse icons

Originally, you only had one option for the expand and collapse icons, which were chevrons:

While the chevron icon is still the default option, we’ve now added two new options:

• Plus/minus

  

• Caret

  

To find these options, select your hierarchical slicer and navigate to the Format pane > Items > Expand/collapse icon:

Icons now scale with font size

This next improvement is not just for hierarchical slicer but for all slicers: the icons in the slicer now scale with the font size.

Here’s an example showing that the icons have scaled to match the text sized, which has been increased to 16 pt:

Ability to customize indentation for child items

We’ve added the option for you to now customize the indentation for the child items in the hierarchy.

To find this setting, select your hierarchical slicer and navigate to the Format pane > Items > Stepped layout indentation.

Supported with AI visuals

Another addition to this release is that the hierarchical slicer is now supported with AI visuals.
Here’s an example where you can see that the hierarchical slicer is cross-filtering the Key influencers visual:

Modern ribbon is now generally available

The modern ribbon is now generally available. Thank you for giving your feedback during the preview period. We’ll continue to make additions and add more features to the ribbon in the future. Please visit our documentation to learn more about the changes and benefits of the new ribbon.

RLS is now supported for Featured Tables in Excel’s Data Types gallery

We’ve continued to improve the featured tables capability with row-level security support. Now, when you mark a table as featured and then publish to the Power BI service, that table will appear in Excel’s data types gallery even if it has RLS rules applied. Previously, these tables were not shown in Excel. This new enhancement means that users in Excel will only see the rows of data they have access to.

Analytics

AI insights are now generally available

AI Insights in Power Query are now generally available. AI Insights give you access to a collection of pre-trained machine learning models that enhance your data preparation efforts. These include text analytics functions (sentiment scoring, key phrase extraction and language detection), image detection as well as connectivity to Azure ML models.

Please note that the text analytics and image detection functions require access to an AI workload (all Premium nodes and A3/EM3 and above). Connectivity to Azure ML models is available to all users.

Visualizations

Line chart dot formatting options

This month, we have a new formatting update to line charts. Now, you can have different colored dots show up for categories across all of your series. This update can help you call out particular points in your line charts.

To turn this on, go to the Data colors tab in the formatting pane. In it, you should see all the categories in a series. There you can change the color that you want the dot to appear for each category.

If you want to remove the dots from your line chart, just click the Revert to default button. Note that in this release, this feature will show dots for your categories across all of your series. In the coming releases, we plan to extend this feature to allow for more control over choosing particular series.