If you want to catch up quickly on what is new and what is
Important in the Power BI monthly update then I bring you the highlights.
Today, I'm going to cover the Power BI September 2018 update
But at the end of this video you can also access a complete playlist of all the recent updates
Hey I'm Avi Singh Power BI Pro and I help companies and individuals get quick and powerful
results using the agile method for Power BI and if you would like to become a Power BI Pro
Make sure to subscribe and click the bell. So you're notified whenever I go live to answer your Power BI questions
We're going to cover the five key highlights from the September update and number four is gonna blow your mind.
So make sure you stick around for that if there are updates or changes you would like to see in Power BI
post them in the comments below so we can all vote for them. Let's start with number one M
intellisense now if you have used query editor and you haven't why not query editor is the
kitchen of Power BI this is where you come to clean shape transform all of your data, and it's
Incredibly powerful now 99% of what I do. Okay, fine, maybe 95 percent is just using the ribbon up above and that's
Incredibly powerful, but you can go even deeper when you tap into the underlying M language for the credi editor
Now this is where intelligence comes in
so if you were to click on the advanced editor you would see the underlying code and
Intellisense is a new feature which kind of makes it all very rich like other
kind of like visual studio or other programming environments where you can highlight an element and you can
Autocomplete so I can say if I was writing it out
I could say table dot and
Notice how it shows me all the options and I can go from there. So really really cool. However
You know
The other place where I often use, this is the formula bar if you haven't turned it on make sure you do
This is a great way to learn and get familiar with M language and it's not there yet
But I'm sure it's coming soon and it's gonna be pretty incredible. Number two. There are a lot of changes around reporting
So let's cover them one by one
The first one is the dot plot now dot plots are kind of like scatter plots
But with a twist so scatter plots is gonna have two different
Measures on the x axis and the y axis and what you're now able to do is to instead of specifying
Measures on both axes you can specify a category on one of these axes
So in this case notice that the one at the bottom is is not a measure. It's a category in this case
I'm using territory and this gives you a very different visual layout and this can be a pretty powerful
techniques this can even replace your bar charts or column charts and a lot of scenarios and
Show you other rich visuals. The next one is the ability to copy value and selection from table and matrix
And yeah, this is gonna come in handy
so here we have a table visual and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click and
You can see we have the options here to copy value or copy selection
So I'm gonna choose copy value and I'm gonna show you if you base this in Excel it actually copies
Well, in this case, I copied the label. Let me copy the sales value
so copy value and I get just that value suggest that single value now instead you can maybe
select a few of these and
Then right-click and say copy
selection this time, so I'm going to choose the other option here and
Now you get all the selection as promised. They go, right?
So it keeps the headers keeps the values and and and so forth
So that's pretty handy
but you can also watch a quick tip video on how you can connect an Excel pivot table to power bi that may make doing
Something like this far more easier next up. We have report theme options. So if you're not a big fan of the color scheme use
You can go to switch team and now there are quite a few options available to you now
You also have the ability to go deeper and create your own theme files and import them here
But these would give a little more flexible options to somebody who is just starting out
And just wants to experiment with a slightly different color theme set
Next up on the report page tooltips and I'm gonna show you a quick example
They're now under general availability is not in preview anymore. And
Report base to tooltips are now also supported by cards. So let's take a quick look at both of them
So the way the report page tooltips work is that I have a tooltip
So again, this is and it this was released some time ago
but now it just came out of preview so you can define a page which is
you know you set up that this is a tooltip and then you can leverage this as a
Hover for some of these items so notice I'm and bikes and if I hover over that it just shows me
Information from that tooltip page that I had just created right so I can go kind of bike show that to me
accessories clothing so it shows and of course this is totally custom built so you can design it just the way you want and
Coming back here. The other news here is that cards also support tooltips?
And now if you hover over cards you can set that up to show a specific tool to page
Next we have the PDF file connector. Now. This is in preview
So make sure you turn it on before you try to use it, but this is pretty exciting
and
Now if you go to new source more you would see the PDF
Connector right there as long as you turned on the preview or you can also search for it by using PDF now
I will just do a quick test run so connected give you some warning about the preview
That's great. And I'm just gonna point to a webpage that I have
with the PDF file and
It's going out and connecting to that and great and you can see it brings in these different elements
And I'm not going to go ahead with the rest of it
But you can imagine that this can be pretty easily
what I ended up doing was combining all those tables that were available in that file and
Outputting a simple table back which is gonna be loaded to my model
So go ahead and try to connect to your PDF files and see how it works out to you. The next feature is
Aggregations and this is pretty incredible not this is part off that composite model and I'll show you how it works
So what I have here is essentially a model which is using directquery to connect to a source database now
I will say that as a model author that's not the default mode that I operate in as a model author
but again in this world of self-service bi
Once the the IT team of the BI team was the model authors have built out a model
A lot of other users might be connecting to it in directquery mode. So this is more for kind of the the self-service bi
empowered user so they're connecting to a model using direct query because they do not want to bring in possibly millions billions of
rows into their into the power bi desktop
So director is a great way to accomplish that and in here all of these tables are in
Direct query mode, but then with the use of composite models
I can have one table here which provides me the key
aggregations that I used more often most often and I can set that up to
Import so I'll show you and that is all set up using simply query editor
But the key is that one of them the sales aggregate table if I click on the properties for that. Hold on
So I'm gonna I'm just gonna right click and say properties and here you can see that sales aggregate
I have switched this to import overall
This model has now a mixed storage mode because I have some direct query and some important and that's of course composite model
Which I've covered extensively
In the past few videos and we'll put a link so you can access that at the end of this video as well
So this one is import and what that does is
it takes the
It takes to the tables that are connected to both of them
you know, what is just easier to show you so think about this that sales aggregate so calendar and
territories those ones are driven by an imported table and I'm gonna be
Obviously, they're gonna be stored locally whereas this is direct query and that's going back to the server
So the performance of this one is going to be incredibly fast and when?
It cannot answer these questions
when maybe you ask a question around the customer of the product, which are not
The aggregation then it's gonna go back in the directquery mode and create this query the server
alright so ready so here what I have is I took seals and I sliced and diced it using the tables that are
Working under directquery mode. So this is by product color and customer
Customer occupation. So let's what I have running is a sequel server profiler
I'm gonna clean that
so you can see what the queries so I'm just gonna include filter on a blue color and go back and
Indeed there were queries that were sent back to the server. So let's clean that up again and
And let's do something on the customer table
So I click on this and if you go back again
There were queries that was sent back to the server because that's how direct query works
but now let's see how we can leverage the aggregation that we have both for calendar and
the country table
so now have the similar set up but let's go ahead and wipe this off and now
Let's click on United States and everything filters down. But if you go back there was no query issued back to the server
this was answered within the model itself because if you because this is leveraging the
Aggregations tables the key is that this is stored locally in import and it's going to give you much better performance
so as a designer as a model author you you can choose where you need the aggregation and and and
in other cases you always have the fallback for direct query so you can see how incredibly
Powerful, this can be and this just this is just building on
the
already amazing feature of composite models and and
Frankly, I can't wait to see where Microsoft is headed from here clearly
They're not gonna leave any stone unturned
In the journey to empower the business users and make the self-service bi a reality for everybody number five
I'm just gonna mention really quick
so Q&A support obviously power bi has had Q&A for a long time now both on power bi comm the service and
Inside power bi desktop, we can ask questions as well
But now Q&A support has been enabled for row-level security now
This was a big bottleneck for those people using role of the security in their models
It did not support Q&A. Now it does so everybody rejoice, right?
So that was a recap off the September
2018 update if you have any updates that you've been waiting for
Make sure to post them in the comments below so we can all work for them and click the link shown here or down below
To access the complete updates playlist so you can catch up on
everything that's new and exciting in the recent power bi updates and if all of this leaves you feeling
overwhelmed I want to remind you to focus on the 20% that matters the most and
My Barbie eye tutorial is a great way to start on that path until next time power on my friend
Hey keep watching more videos and keep learning power bi but if you did enjoy this video
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All the good stuff while we're on my friends