Spring ’18 summary of what’s new in Business Intelligence Platform

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

Jan ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Ask Top N questions in Q&A - Easily ask Top N questions in Q&A in both Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service.
• Azure Active Directory authentication - Leverage Azure Active Directory authentication when connecting to Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• Hide pages from reading mode - Authors control which report pages are exposed to users.

Power BI Service

• Ability to share and favorite reports - Shared reports appear in recent, favorites, and “shared with me” lists, similar to dashboards.
• Push apps - Admins can automatically deploy Power BI apps to users.
• Pin from apps to dashboard - Create dashboards that combine information from other shared dashboards, reports, or apps in an integrated view.
• Persistent filters - With persistent filters, Power BI saves a user’s slicer and filter values, and automatically applies them when the user returns.
• Custom visual administrator control - Power BI admins can disable custom visuals for an organization.

Power BI Mobile

• Visio custom visual support - Custom visuals are presented in the mobile app when users tap the visual and sign into their Visio online account.
• Responsive visuals optimized for phone layout - Text—such as labels—also adjust based on the size of the visuals.

Power BI Embedded

• Capacity API – Using Enhanced Application Lifecycle Management capabilities, you can use APIs to assign or remove Workspaces from Power BI capacity.
• Row-level security on Azure Analysis Services based on CustomData - Filter data based on the CustomData function in Azure Analysis Services for row-level security.
• Custom layout - Dynamically change the size and layout definitions of a report page. Use one of the layouts in Power BI Desktop, or a fixed size to match the application element.
• Phased embedding - Load embedded content in the background to improve performance and get object metadata.
• Single visual embedding - Embed one or more visuals inside an iFrame.

Feb ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Report level slicers - Filter other pages of the report.
• Cross-highlight across multiple visuals - Multi-select data points across visuals.
• Quick measures - Support for live connections and custom date tables.

Power BI Mobile

• Ability to invite and favorite reports - Users can view reports shared with them, share reports with others, view favorite reports, and mark reports as favorites.

Power BI Embedded

• Azure monitoring - With usage metrics, monitor the consumption of resources, and trigger actions when thresholds are met.
• Azure US Government Cloud availability - Power BI Embedded is available for United States government customers.
• Model Parameters API - Get or set predefined model parameters using APIs.
• Visual level filters - Apply and capture filters for embedded visuals.

Feb ’18 – Public Preview

Power BI Desktop

• SAP HANA connector - Treats SAP HANA as a multi-dimensional source.
• Organizational visuals store - Discover and import custom visuals distributed by your Power BI administrator.

Power BI Service

• Manage organizational visuals store - Power BI administrators can deploy and manage custom visuals for their organization.

March ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Bookmarking - Bookmark report states to keep track of an exploration, tell a story, or create custom navigation.
• New SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) connectors.

Power BI Service

• Share content with consumer accounts - Share content with other users who have email addresses from consumer email services and telecommunications providers.
• Larger node sizes in Power BI Premium – Organizations can use P4 and P5 nodes to run larger workloads on premium capacity.
• Performance reporting for Power BI Premium - Provides insights about how Premium capacity resources are utilized, troubleshooting performance issues, and deciding when to upgrade to a larger node size.
• Dashboard commenting - Comment on reports and dashboards to provide context, ask questions, and engage others in the conversation.

Power BI Mobile

• Report tooltip touch optimization - Data point selection with tap and hold gesture.
• Power BI for mixed reality (Public Preview) - Mixed reality experience for viewing dashboards and reports, and positioning them in their surroundings with Microsoft HoloLens. Available in Microsoft Store.
• Persistent filters - Users resume working with report filters and slicers in the same state as their last interaction.
• Phone optimization for embedded reports - Mobile app developers who use embedded reports for phone optimized layout can resize and position visuals to fit the device.
• External sharing - Users can share reports and dashboards with external users.

Power BI Embedded

• Bookmarks support - Apply bookmarks on embedded reports and control UI elements through APIs.
• Mobile layout support - Load embedded report pages in a phone layout.

Power BI report server

• Power BI Desktop features available since October ’17:

  • Drill with filtering of all visuals on page
  • Rule-based conditional formatting for table and matrix
  • Cell alignment for table and matrix
  • Lock objects on your reports
  • Report options for slow data sources
  • Filtering performance improvements
  • Selection pane and visual display controls
  • Bookmarking
  • Report-level slicers
  • Quick measures
  • Cross-highlight across multiple visuals
  • DirectQuery performance improvements

March ’18 - Public Preview

Power BI Desktop

• Canvas tooltips - Design report pages for use as tooltips for a custom experience.

April ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Control over linguistic schema - Report authors can improve Q&A results for users by adjusting the linguistic schema with phrasing and synonyms specific to the model domain.
• New experiences for Q&A in reports - Report authors can enable Q&A experiences for report consumers with suggested starting questions. These user experiences surface in Power BI Service, Power BI Embedded, and Cortana.
• Organizational visuals store - Discover and import custom visuals from the Power BI admin.

Power BI Service

• Data source setup improvements - Easily configure gateways and diagnose common errors.
• Organizational visuals store - Discover and import custom visuals from the Power BI admin.
• Administrator tenant usage reporting - APIs allow admins to gain insights into workspace, report, and dataset artifacts across the tenant using APIs.
• Incremental data refresh (Power BI Premium) - In Power BI Desktop, configure a refresh table for each table in the model that is to load incrementally, and then publish it to a Power BI Premium workspace. Thereafter, each scheduled refresh loads only new or changed data.

Power BI Mobile

• Drill-down and drill-up support - Users drill down and drill up to analyze data on mobile via tap and hold to open a tooltip menu on report visuals.

Power BI Embedded

• Azure load monitoring - Monitor consumption of resources, and trigger actions when thresholds are met.
• Azure Alerts - Use Azure Alerts to set up actions based on the load on your resource, as tracked by different metrics. With Alerts you can set up notifications or scripts that will handle different situations.
• Get data APIs - Enable applications to extract data shown in visuals.

May ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Drill-through on measures – Power BI now supports drilling through on measures. This includes passing through the filter and slicer context from the current page.
• Conditional formatting based on another column – Table and matrix visuals can leverage columns that aren’t necessarily part of the visual when they’re conditionally formatted.
• Incremental data refresh – Users can set up incremental data refresh policies that will be applied when they publish to the Power BI service.

Power BI Embedded

• Set iFrame background - Configure the background of the iFrame to be transparet through JavaScript API, so that you will have full control over the background color or image that surrounds the embedded element.
• Onboarding experience - Onboarding tool makes initial setup fast and easy.

May ’18 – Public Preview

Power BI Service

• Incremental data refresh - Incrementally load new data into a dataset without reloading all the data.

June ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Filters on data view – In the data view of Power BI Desktop, users can now filter the data that they are working with.

Power BI Service

• Multiple-geographic regions for Power BI Premium - Create Premium capacities in geographic locations that are different from the Power BI tenant to achieve compliance requirements.
• Set up email subscriptions for other users.

Power BI Mobile

• Drill-through support - On mobile, use drill-through to navigate from one report page to another report page filtered by a selected entity.

Power BI Embedded

• Azure diagnostics - Use error logging for analysis and tracking.
• Workspace collection deprecation.

June ’18 - Public Preview

Power BI Service

• Workspaces with Azure AD groups - Workspaces have their own roles and permissions separate from Office 365 groups to enable more control over management of workspaces, including assigning workspace roles to individual users. The preview is available for customers with Power BI deployments that meet certain criteria. Contact your Microsoft account representative to learn more about how you can participate.

July – September ’18 - General Availability

Power BI Desktop

• Accessibility: slicers - End users can use a keyboard to interact with slicers.
• Additional quick insights - Users can right-click on a data point to ask “What factors affect a measure?” and get suggested visuals that explain this effect.
• Copy data from table and matrix visuals - Support for copying data from a table or matrix visual into other applications.
• Flexible matching in Q&A - Better Q&A results when a user misspells words while asking a question.
• Report wallpapers - Control the chrome surrounding your report pages.
• Show measures as clickable URLs - Use measures to define a hyperlink to navigate from a report to any other web address.
• Theming over report level and visual container styles - Richer controls over Power BI report themes allow you to set report level settings (like background color) and visual level controls (like titles and borders).
• Theming general availability - Support for theming text boxes and UI-driven controls for updating the theme.

Power BI Service

• Dataset metadata translations - Users see dataset fields in their client locale and language when translations are defined in the dataset or Analysis Services model.
• Export to PDF - Export a Power BI report in PDF format.
• Filters for report sharing - When sharing a report, the currently applied filters on a report will be used, allowing you to create personalized views tailored for different audiences.
• Additional report parameter support - Set filters for date columns, use new operators (less than, greater than, less than or equal, greater than or equal), and filter on multiple field values.

Power BI Embedded

• Visual level configuration - Control which visual functions, such as focus mode and export data, are exposed to users.
• Better troubleshooting for developers - Developers will be able to get more specific info on different errors, to help them troubleshoot and solve problems, as well as override the end-user experience in case of an error.
• Slicers API - Enable control throughout the session on the slicers the user interacts with.

July – September ’18 – Public Preview

Power BI Desktop

• Aggregations - Support for caching aggregated queries while still allowing users to drill down to the detail level through Direct Query.
• Model diagram and navigation – An improved modeling experience that scales to large and complex data models with many tables, calculations, and other objects.
• Composite models - Support for mashing up DirectQuery and import data sources in Power BI Desktop.
• Power BI dataflows connector - Easily add entities from Power BI dataflows to your data models, and use them to create advanced reports and visualizations leveraging the standard schema of the common data model and Azure Data Lake technologies.

Power BI Service

• Smart alerts - Users receive automatic alerts when there are important changes to data.

• Query acceleration for large datasets - Dataset authors create in-memory aggregations to enable interactive queries over big data.

• Workspace search - Search for and find content across all the workspaces that you have access to.

• SSRS reports for Power BI Premium - Publish and view SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports in Power BI Premium.

• Historical capacity metrics (Power BI Premium) - Get key insights into the health of your capacity and learn how the usage of your current capacity affects performance of refreshes and queries.

Power BI Embedded

• App-only token support - Identify an application on the Power BI platform for enhanced deployment, security, and Application Lifecycle Management.
• Multi-region support - Purchase capacities in different Azure regions without being binded to your Power BI home tenant, while being sure data resides in the capacity's region.

Power BI Insights apps

• Power BI for Sales Insights – Brings in key entities from either Dynamics 365 or Salesforce, allowing sales managers to track sales performance across products and salespeople.
• Power BI for Service Insights – Takes advantage of Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, Field Service, or Project Service Automation data to provide insights in each of these areas.