Power BI in Brief - April 2020
Each month, we sum up the top headlines in the world of Power BI to keep you informed, educated, and equipped to use Power BI to its fullest. If you have questions or are interested in learning more about what Power BI can do for you, contact the Power BI experts at ArcherPoint.
Power BI and COVID-19: Helping Public Agencies Inform Their Communities
Microsoft is offering a free Power BI toolkit for state and local governments to help them keep their communities informed about COVID-19 at the city, county, state, and national levels. Using Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Publish to the Web capability, government bodies can acquire and analyze data, create visualizations of the data, and publish this information to the web quickly. In addition, governments around the world are using Power BI to share information about COVID-19.
The Power BI toolkit is free for state and local governments to analyze data and publish to their websites. To learn more about how Power BI is being used to combat COVID-19, see Microsoft’s blog, How Public Agencies Keep Communities Informed on COVID-19 with Power BI.
April 2020 Update from Microsoft
Here are some highlights from the April 2020 Update:
- Microsoft has announced the general availability of Query Diagnostics for Power Query in Power BI. Query Diagnostics allows you to determine what Power Query is doing during authoring and in some refresh workflows in Power BI Desktop. Query diagnostics can tell you what sort of operations are being performed and when, what data sources you’re connecting to, the native queries being emitted in certain cases, the time spent on different actions, and much more.
- Microsoft is also announcing new Power BI features coming in April. For a complete list, see the release notes for Power BI 2020 release wave 1. The new features include:
- Taking advantage of new AI capabilities to better understand your data and predict future outcomes.
- Providing more visibility into enterprise administration.
- Offering advanced reporting scenarios for enterprise use cases.
- Using a global, governed, scalable, secure, and unified BI platform to meet your self-service and centralized BI needs.
- Simplifying self-service analytics.
- Also coming in April, Microsoft will be automatically upgrading reports to the new Power BI filter pane to help report designers have more control over the look and feel of filters in their reports. Please note that users will not be able to revert to the old filter pane once the upgrade is in place.
Read more about these and other updates in the Microsoft Power BI Blog.
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