We're going to cover the top ten Power BI features of 2018 based on your votes.
This is a list of top features that you voted on
If you didn't guess which one came out ahead number one
go ahead and leave that in the comment below we would see if you get it right Power BI team released an astounding
150 plus features in
2018 now if you want to get caught up quickly on the highlights of all the monthly updates then you can check out my complete
Playlist for the monthly update highlights linked above and in the description below
Hey, I'm Avi Singh Microsoft MVP and a best-selling Power BI author.
And if you would like to become a Power BI Pro, make sure to hit subscribe and click that bell
So you are notified whenever I go live to answer your Power BI questions.
Let's start a journey at number 10
which is search the formatting and
analytics pane and we saw this first in February and this has been such a lifesaver now in Power BI we can have
Something up too much of a good thing
I mean
there are a lot of it's very
Option rich now and the part of your team has added a lot of functionality in there, which is great
But sometimes it makes it a little tricky to search for stuff
You're looking for sometimes something as simple as trying to change the size of something
That's where the search bar comes in handy
all you have to do is type in size and you
See a filtered list of exactly the options that you're looking for
Making it so easy to work with at number nine. We have the ability to
Copy/paste across power bi desktop files and a lot of people appreciate it and voted for that and this came out just in November
so here you can be working across two different bar bi desktop file and you can take
like an image or text and copy it over but not just that you can also take
Visual elements like graphs and charts and copy it over now
Of course if the model is different you might need to adjust that a little bit now beyond that
I also want to mention that's separate from this measure
I do want to mention that actually you cannot copy the measures across models without some hacks now
You can copy
queries from query editor from one power bi desktop file to another or even to excel power query and
Far beyond desktop, so that's pretty cool
I would like to warn you at this point of just feeling weary of
Building a lot of similar models if you're doing that. You're probably not leveraging power bi the correct way
Join me in one of my talk barbiere sessions and i'll be happy to talk more at number eight
We have the ability to create report measures even when connected through a live connection
This came out in May and a super cool feature. Let me show that to you in a demo
So the scenario here is that the IT department has provided a central model for you a Barbie eye model
now when IT does it they either publish it to Barbie Icom or
hosted in an agile analysis or SSA established server in either of those scenarios
The business user can connect to them in this case. I'm going to connect to
so you can connect to an analysis services server and just provide the credentials and
Specify that you want to connect live or you can connect to a live power bi data set connections
That's what I'm gonna do now
So here I'm gonna launch the power bi data set and I'm gonna just choose my favorite adventureworks
Right and even though it says load that's not quite accurate. It's not loading anything. It's not importing any data
It's just giving you a live connection to that server
So you can see the the these two tabs disappear, which is a tell tale of a live connection
I only have this thin reporting layer connected to that live model up there
but the feature that I'm talking about here and why it's so mind-blowing is that you can be connected to that server and I have
a really simple model, but imagine that we we have
sales and
cost over there and we definitely don't want to of me so
in imagine if the model didn't have
margin or any other measure that the business user
Required but wasn't providing the system the business user can simply go in here. Click new measure and just define a measure
Connected to that live system
So let's try that again
So I can say margin and I'm gonna put a dot because I already have that measure different
So here I can say margin is just sales
Minus cost and now this is a really really simple measure but you get the idea the power here now
this is something which is is I really think that change the dynamic of that IT versus business has always been a
Friction kind of a you know pulled in different
Directions and I think it has a potential to change it from that did this and there is more love
Coming in this direction. There are there are more features which focus on this clearly
This has been a big theme for the power bi team in
2018 to try to bring these two groups together IT and business after all they're part of the same company
Why not have them work together? How is that for an idea?
The number seven feature on our list is data profiling in the creditor and this we saw in October now
let me first talk about what is it for now often the
goal
When we were building a Barbier model is to build this beautiful
Model with the the data table and the lookup table to who what where and how but often when you go into a data set
It's a it's it's quite complicated. It's quite messy
so you just want to first go in and before you even start thinking about the model just get a feel of the data and
That is where data profiling comes in
Now before this you have to kind of do it the hard way just pull in the data and it analyzed in a pivot table
Or something like that or use other tools for example sequel provides data profiling tools, but now that's available, right?
Inside power bi in the query editor and there are more features which are gonna be introduced in here as well
So you right now you can turn it on by going to the View tab and saying column quality and column
Distribution and that gives you this rich profile of the data and just by looking at it you can get a sense of hey
which can be
Doesn't have a primary key. Does it have valid values is there maybe some cleanup involved and things like that?
So this is definitely gonna be a huge help for all the folks who do data modeling in power bi
Number six is something that shows you the strength of
Microsoft power bi yes. My friend said this is the all the AI enhanced features in power bi and these have been released throughout
Throughout the year and of course
There's a natural language QA and that's pretty mind-blowing but that's kind of the front end the reporting side of thing
What's lovely and amazing that a lot of AI enhanced features are in the backend as well for the data model?
So let me talk about some of these so there's of course fuzzy matching
And of course, this is a complex problem to solve and you know
If you don't have the exact wording if it's Billy if it's mistyped or something like that
Fuzzy matching can just use kind of that logic to do that match for you without you doing the heavy lifting
So this is a pretty cool feature and this we saw both in October and December
The next one I want to talk about is the column by example and again
Every time I type it now I'm pretty used to writing formulas just but every time I kind of end up trying it
I'm really impressed
so the idea here is that you want to do a set of say calculations or
reformatting or something on a set of columns you go in there and you you just start typing what your desired end result is you
Just give it a one or two examples and then it figures that out and fills in the rest of the formula
So again pretty mind-blowing
The next one I want to talk about is pretty similar, but again equally amazing, which is web by example
So if you if the web page of you're trying to pull information from a web page
But it's not a simple table element that power bi can just pull that one is easy
But it's got complex elements. You can just pull the page and say yep. I want you know, I want this element
I want this element. You can just type it in and it figures the rest out. How cool is that?
And this we saw in the July release so before moving on I'll just say that this this capability
Shows the strength of power bi and the strength of Microsoft behind it, right?
I mean, it's not just any organization its Microsoft
They got all this other stuff going on and they can tap into that and have that
Expertise and have that be surface in power bi much to the joy of all of us? Oh my god
We are in the top five and the top five is one of crowd favorites the ability to sync
Slicers across multiple pages and you saw this in February now?
This is something which has been there in Excel for a long time
You can have a slicer on one sheet and have it synced or connected to all
The other sheets or all the other pivot tables charts on other sheets
But now we have that ability in power bi you just have to select the slicer
Click the sync slicer box and then it gives you this total control over
Where you want?
Sink the slicer where you want to show the slicer so you can have a layouts or reports where you have one set of slicers
Which controls the entire reports controls all the pages in that report making a lot of scenarios?
very easy to use we are at number four and this one is about the ability to
Connect to data sets in the power bi service and I already showed you a demo when I was trying to show you
The ability to create a report level measures
But let's just sit there and see how awesome this is and I'll tell you why so we first saw this in April
So again, you can go to get data and power bi desktop and say no. No, I don't want to import data
I don't want to start over. I already have a model
I just want to create a thin report connect it to my model connect it to that single source of truth
so you say connect to the power bi data set and you can build reports off of that and
this is the beauty of power bi this is the real strength of power bi that's
Ability to create the single source of truth
You can have a single publish model
But then you can have a string of reports connected to it in a visualization or reporting tool of your choice
So you can connect power bi report as you just saw and of course you can use
Analyze and Excel to create Excel reports and heck if you really wanted to you could also connect
SSRS our tableau reports to that single source of truth your power bi model and guess who loves single sources of truth IT
Does that so IT loves the fact that folks are connecting back to a single source, they're not creating their own craziness
And of course business loves it because they have the flexibility to create their own reports
Without having to redo all the effort that IT is already done
So again one more for the IT and business love-story before we go to the top three
I do want to address one thing which you may be suffering from
Too much of a good thing the power bi overwhelming at times. It does seem like oh my god
There's so much to learn. How can I kind of keep up on it?
it feels like you're trying to climb up on a sand dune and I want you and I want to say
Stop don't feel that way. I want you to remember that less is more
There's that 20% core that it's gonna give you that 80% of the results and those core concepts
Thankfully don't change that much. So and of course I cover I focus on that 20%
Inside my power bi tutorial available
to you on my channel just click the links above or in the description with that said we are at number 3 and this was
A surprise for me so number 3 is M intellisense
We saw this in September and this was a surprise because this is an incomplete feature. They haven't even completed it yet
So what is the M intelligence about so in the advanced editor now? All of this is beautifully colored
There's autocomplete. So if you're typing something in there, it shows you the options and so forth
So it's very rich
But I would say that it's not complete yet because power bi team is still to deliver this inside the formula bar
Now they have said that this is coming but clearly the fact that you all voted for it and made a number 3
shows that you all love it and you can't wait to have this feature number 2 continues that IT and business love story like
nobody's business
Composite models import plus direct query. So let me tell you why
It really brings IT and business together
so a classic challenge when it comes to IT and business, is that IT bills a
Single model and it would like the business user to just connect to it using direct query
You know, there's no need to import. Usually these data sets are really large. They've already done all the heavy lifting
So the business user should just be able to create their own reports
And now that is possible that has been possible for a long time, but it doesn't stop there
The business user does what business users do they want to try to?
Import something else in there and they want to mash it up with something and do their own thing and it could be an excel
File it could be a CSV. It could be a web page. Who knows what right and now
composite data model make that possible and
That's why it is one big win for the IT and business love-story. No, I can't do justice to composite models in this video
That's why I have a complete playlist. You can access it using the links above in the corner or down in the description below
So now we are at number one
But before we talk about that
I have a confession to make so I
would see this
item pop up on the ideas da power bi comm site about people asking for a pivot table and I was like
Oh stupid idea of the year. I mean, we already have a pivot table my friends Excel. It's amazing. I love it folks
Love it. Why would you want something else?
All you have to do is analyze an excel and you have a pivot table
connected back to your power bi model the single source of truth that we talked about but
I'm so glad that the bar bi team did not listen to me
So that concept is valid
but it's still useful to have a little more rich functionality in power bi and
They have delivered that with our number one feature the king of the hill the new matrix
Visual with the plus minus collapse buttons and this came out in November
But a lot of prep work was done in earlier releases as well to to beef up and make the matrix visually really cool
So I want to show you what it looks like
But yeah, they're in the options you can turn on or off the plus minus icons
I
Still think and I think you would agree with me that it's not a substitute for pivot table except pivot tables are or sheer awesomeness
They're great for that scenario, but when you are already building a power bi report
Then this gives you a pretty cool functionality to just have it there and not have to create a separate excel report
Let's take a look. So look at that
That's our number one feature the new matrix visual with the plus minus buttons doesn't get better than this
so hey leave a comment and let us know if your favorite feature was at the top of the list or
What do you love about power bi just hit subscribe and join me live on talk power bi fridays
And if you're just getting started with power bi make sure to check out my power bi tutorial until next time power on my friend
Hey keep watching more videos and keep learning power bi but if you did enjoy this video
I would love to hear from you. So leave a comment like subscribe
All the good stuff while we're on my friends