These are the top five features you must know about in the latest Power BI update of September 2019.
These top five features me will make your reports look good give you more control.
Hey who doesn't want that right when working with Power BI files is gonna make it easier for you to work in Power BI desktop
And not just that there's a feature which is gonna make it easier for your users
to use your Power BI reports and last but not the least, it's gonna make you look more handsome and get you a pay raise.
Well, actually the last one maybe only half true our number one feature at this time is something small
But we feel has a big impact so stick around for that
Let's start at number five
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Number five on our list today is new bar bi themes. You can access the themes feature by going to the Home tab and
Well, it's right there switch team
Now Barnea team has done some work to create new themes which are supposedly brighter
Better bolder so you're gonna find that in here in any new file
You create will use this new default theme
Now, of course, the old files will keep the classic theme, which if you're still far enough
Then you can access it
under
more themes and even if new report you want to have the classic old look you can go back and select that and I'll say
It comes down to personal preference, but I do prefer the classic
Look, it's a little muted. And if you've heard me talk about visualization a Steven whew fan and it talks all talks about
Kind of a gentler milder approach right would indeed don't hate the people on the head with data with flashy visualizations
So I kind of like the classic look so I may stick with that
But you know, I'll just show you you can switch to the default theme and it might mess up your reports a little bit
So watch out for that if you go back and update your reports to this new team
Then you might have to go fix something. So let me just show you the you know the colors that'll show so here
I just put you know kind of on the legend so you can see the colors and of course if you go check out
The color palette over here you're gonna see that how it looks quite different
Than the regular palette
There are some other usability improvements as well such as font size font sizes and things like that
Which also would make the default?
the default new theme
Probably more usable number four are some improvements to the visualization pane that good old visualization pane
Well, yes, it's got some updates that this is the feature that I'm talking about
This is a visualization pane and it's been the same way for a while. Now now the improvement
For this update is that if you can kind of customize it
So if there are some visuals which you don't use perhaps you don't tend to use the are visual you can
Unpin that visual and it's going to ask you to say okay and maybe you don't use python hey there or something like that
so you get the idea here that you can kind of customize the look and you can unpin the visuals you don't use and
That's going to give you a little more control over it and of course so these ones are being shown here right now
But if you open a new file
They will completely disappear there wouldn't be shown and what you're gonna have to do to
Restore them is to come back here and say restore default visuals and that's gonna put them back on
On on that panel over here
So again just gives you a little more control and that's hopefully it's gonna make you a much faster as well building your report
so you can
unpin
The visuals you never use and that's gonna keep make it a little more tight and concise and easy to use now
Of course one visual which sometimes doesn't get love from everybody is the pie chart
All event that I'm on the fence on this one as well
My mentor Steven phew he seems to be totally against bar charts
So I'm asking you are you gonna unpin the pie chart or not? Leave a comment. Let me know
Is that something that you use or do not like to use?
Let's move on number three, which is more conditional formatting
now of course bar bi team has promised that essentially what they're doing is making every element in the
You know kind of the color and other elements of this they are making it so that you can customize them
You can program them almost and they just keep extending it feature after feature
Now I will say that
sometimes it can be a little hard to find but often you're gonna find this when you hover over something and
You you see these three dots which you want kind of disappear as soon as I click that but if you if you look here
That if these three dots appear then I want you to click on that and that's where you're gonna find
Conditional formatting and that's gonna have a lot of rich options which we have covered in Prior update
So I'm not gonna rehash that go watch the previous updates to get the details on how conditional formatting really works
But this specific release, let me switch to that tab here
It introduces conditional formatting for border
So if you go to your border color and you turn it on then this now can be conditionally formatted
it's right so you can maybe use the border to
emphasize that specific visual if the certain conditions are met and also a lot of
The gauge chart got a lot of love. So a lot of
Elements here can be conditionally formatted
so in fact
I think I did play around and added a fill conditional formatting to the fill color and you can see that now it is
based on rules and
Based on what the measure is it turns itself yellow red or green and that's conditional formatting in play for you
number two is the ability to
Custom format strings now, I'll admit that. This was a little hard to find for me
Now, of course now that I found it I realized that power bi team was always pointing me in the right way
So yeah, so custom format sounds really cool. Of course in Excel
Think about that how you can really specify a custom string to format any number or anything else?
And so this is similar to that although it uses VBA style strings
so let's
we're gonna link to
The complete video from the power bi team so that you can get more details on that
So here let's try the variance measure, which is right here actually
So if I go to variance, and the first place that I was looking for was format menu
and I really don't quite understand that why the
Custom option wasn't shown here. Actually I can imagine but that's the first place that I was looking for
And of course, that's not the right place to look at least it's not available in that spot
The only spot it is available. The custom formatting is in the modeling tab, which is accessed by clicking on this button
So if I click on the modeling tab, and now if I you know, click around and click to that measure
Then you see that I have a lot of formatting options and one of those is the new custom format
So, let me try that. So I'm gonna switch that to a custom format and
here now I have this option to
Select from few dropdowns, but I also have the option to kind of
Type in anything that I want in here. So again, you can see how the format string is pretty similar to excel as well
Right, so you can type in and kind of create and define your own format using these string rules
And of course now if I go back to the report, then you can see that it is formatted based on my custom formatting
All right. We're on to our number 1 the small but big feature
Hey and on the shout out to our power bi tutorial
So if it just getting started corner to find yourself keep getting stuck in power bi then make sure to check it out
Alright, so our number one feature today is drilled through discoverability
Now I'm gonna see this feature and you would say, ah be seriously has this number one
But why I feel this is number one. So let's go back and and see where this feature shows up
And again, it's really subtle. So the part of my team got some feedback and rightly so and and you know, so that
When there is a drill through name also drilled, so I'll show you what it looks like
So we've covered this actually we will be covering this in separate videos. Make sure to look out for that
so
You know, I can say drill true and I can say give me country detail and takes me to another page now
The challenge is that sometimes if you're just looking at the report, you don't really know and frankly for a lot of cases. Sometimes there's
drill down available and
sometimes in this case there is drill true available and
you know one of those old things right if a forest if if a tree falls in a forest does
Doesn't make a sound right?
So if if there is something cool that you built into a report, but users can't find it
Is it really there?
right
So you could have done a lot of work
With this report with drill through or drill down of some of these features if they're not discoverable
Then they're not worth anything
so I think this is this is a
Key feature, and I'm really glad that probably our team is focusing on it is now so again, this is subtle
I wished it wasn't so sad. I wish this was more in the face or something like that
But still it's something is better than nothing
So here when people hover over this, it just gives you a small general reminder that hey you can right-click to drill through again
I would like to see this for drill down as well and
Maybe other scenarios and maybe have it be more in the face and something
You know kind of popped up on here or something like that if I hover it over there now, of course
There are other tricks where you can you can add helpdesk dividuals and so forth to do that
But this is a nice improvement by the power bi team to see that
What they're doing to trying to make these things a little more discoverable which is gonna make everyone's life easier
So hey, that was our September 2019 update
if you want to catch up on all the recent power of the updates just click in the corner and access our
Complete month by month playlist. Well, let me know what you thought do
you think that these features do make your reports look good give you more control and make it easier for you and your users to
Work on your part of the airport. So let me know in the comments down below and until next time ball run
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