Announcing the New Filter Experience for Power BI Reports

The wait is over!

Power BI has announced that the new filter experience is now generally available. We have updated the look and feel and added a ton of new functionality.

Let’s walk through what’s included in the new filter experience.

Pop-up Filter List

With the new filter experience, report consumers can hover over the filter icon in the visual header to see and read-only list of all the filters or slicers affecting that visual. This makes it super easy for end-users to understand what filters are applied to a visual.

Here are the types of filters this view shows:

• Basic filters
• Slicers
• Cross-highlighting
• Cross-filtering
• Advanced filters
• Top N filters
• Relative Date filters
• Sync-slicers
• Include/Exclude filters
• Filters passed through a URL

Format and Theme

Report creators now have control over the look and feel of the filter pane. The goal here is to make your filter pane feel cohesive with your report.

You can also modify the default formatting of the filter pane with a JSON theme file.

Lock and Hide Filters

You can now lock filters so that report consumers can see that those filters are applied but they cannot modify them.

Additionally, you can hide filters from your report consumers. Hiding filter cards is typically useful if you need to hide data cleanup filters that exclude nulls/blanks or unexpected values. Hidden filters don’t show up in the filter pane nor the filter dialog for a visual.

Sort Filters

Report creators can custom sort their filters in the new filter pane. This is helpful if you want certain filters to be pushed to the top or if you want certain filters to be next to each other.

You can also choose to alphabetically sort the filters.

Rename Filters

You can double-click on the filter car titles to change the display name so that they are more user-friendly for your report consumers.

When you update the display name, it also gets updated in the filter dialog.

Capture Filter State in Bookmarks

With the new filter pane, you can capture the visibility and expanded or collapsed state of the filter pane in your bookmarks. This is useful when you want to customize how the filter pane fits into your data story:

• Hide the pane when you don’t need it.
• Collapse the pane when you need more horizontal real estate for your canvas.
• Keep the pane visible and expanded when you want users to interact with it.

Learn more about Power BI capabilities and get in touch with allonline365 if you are ready to transform your reporting. Contact us on  info@allonline365.com or  +27 (21) 205 3650.

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Resource Credit | Power BI

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Read on for a summary of the announcements we made both in the service and mobile.

• Shared and certified datasets (Preview)
• AI metrics in the Premium Capacity Metrics app
• June update for on-premises data gateway
• General availability of Power BI template apps
• General availability of Paginated Reports in Power BI
• Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)
• Viewer role for the new Power BI workspaces experience
• Updates to Power BI mobile apps
• Roadmap updates

Shared and certified datasets (Preview)

We kicked off June by announcing a public preview of shared certified datasets. With this feature, you can now use a single dataset to build multiple reports across different workspaces. That’s right – dataset owners only need to maintain a single copy of their datasets in their own separate workspace and provide permissions for report authors to use those datasets to build reports. To help users to discover relevant and shared datasets, we released a new discovery experience in the Power BI service and Desktop to make it easier for you to browse and find content. Lastly, as part of this work, we also added new capabilities for dataset owners and tenant administrators to control the use of shared data. Learn more.

AI metrics in the Premium Capacity Metrics app

We released a new version of the Power BI Capacity Metrics app to include new AI metrics that provide details on the health of your AI workloads within your capacity. The latest version (1.10.1.7) of the app also has an AI summary dashboard to show you a seven-day summary of all the capacities that you are an admin for. Check it out for yourself by installing the app or learn more about the latest update here.

June update for on-premises gateway

We also updated the Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of June. Version 3000.6.204 has a new mashup engine, performance profiling based on gateway CPU, SAP Common Crypto library support for SAP BW Application Server Kerberos based SSO, and other small tweaks to keep your datasets up to date. Learn more about the updates in our release blog.

General Availability of Power BI template apps

In February, we announced a public preview of template apps. These apps are integrated packages of pre-built Power BI dashboards and reports, configured to connect to specific data sources. With them, Microsoft partners can quickly access analytics for the apps and services they provide. Partners can also manage the template apps development lifecycle, from development to marketplace to updates. In June, we made template apps generally available by iterating on the feature based on people’s feedback.

General availability of Paginated Reports in Power BI

We also announced the general availability of paginated reports. Based on the technology used in SQL Server Reporting Services, paginated reports bring a new set of enterprise reporting capabilities to the Power BI service. It enables developers and BI professionals to create and distribute highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports right alongside their interactive Power BI content, becoming the first cloud BI solution that combines the power of self-service BI with the needs and capabilities of traditional Enterprise BI scenarios.

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for Power BI Premium (Preview)

Power BI encrypts data at rest for all customers. However, for organizations requiring additional control over how their data is encrypted, we announced Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). This feature allows organizations to configure Power BI to use their own keys, stored in Azure Key Vaults, for data-at-rest encryption instead of Microsoft managed keys. BYOK encryption applies to Power BI Premium capacities only, and organizations can choose to associate different capacities with different keys and/or different key vaults.

Viewer role for the new Power BI workspace experience

We super-charged the new workspaces experience in Power BI by introducing viewer role. Now you can grant read-only access to users within workspaces. The viewer’s role requires a Pro license or for the content to be in Power  BI Premium. If your workspace is in Premium, users with a viewer role who don’t have a Pro license can view the workspace in the workspaces list, navigate to the workspace, and view the content without getting a Pro Trial prompt.

Updates to the Power BI mobile apps

There were multiple updates that went out in June for mobile apps on various platforms. Heres a quick summary:

• Barcode scanning in Android – We updated the Power BI mobile app on Android (phone and tablet) to scan barcodes printed on products or shelves at your store to display related Power BI reports filtered by the scanned value. More about filtering your data with barcodes.
• Support for PBIX reports hosted in PBI-RS over ADFS configuration (iOS & Android) – We added support for Power BI reports (PBIX) hosted in PBI-RS over ADFS configuration in iOS and Android apps
• Siri shortcuts support (iOS) – We updated the iOS Power BI app to allow users to create Siri shortcuts to their Power BI reports and dashboards, that can be accessed via voice later.
• Device-level search (iOS) – We added the ability for you to search for Power BI content within iPhones and iPads that matches the search criteria.
• Protect Power BI with device Biometric ID – We doubled down security by providing iOS app users (or admins) with the ability to configure the Power BI app to require Face ID, Touch ID, or passcode to view their data. Learn more.
• Slideshow (Windows app) – Lastly, we added support for an auto-refresh for single-page reports in a slideshow. If the underline data source of your report is updated, we will pick it up and update the data on your slide automatically.

Roadmap updates

We use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months.  These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently:

• A new experience for report consumption
• New Microsoft Flow actions
• Entity detection and OCR
• Data lineage capabilities

www.allonline365.com

Resource Credit | Microsoft Power BI

It is a good practice to check your datasets periodically for refresh errors.  A quick way is to view the list of datasets in a workspace, but if you are the admin of many workspaces, checking each workspace individually can get tedious. Refresh notification emails provide a convenient alternative. Just leave the checkbox ‘Send refresh failure notification emails to me’ enabled in your refresh configuration and verify that spam filters don’t block the messages from Microsoft Power BI. The following screenshot depicts the refresh configuration for a dataset and a sample notification message.

In the above configuration settings, did you notice the textbox ‘Email these users when the refresh fails’? This is a new capability that has been released.

By using the ‘Email these users when the refresh fails‘ textbox, you can now specify additional users and email-enabled groups. The specified recipients receive refresh failure notifications in addition to the dataset owner. This might be a colleague taking care of your datasets while you are on vacation. It could also be the email alias of your support team taking care of refresh issues for your department or organization. You could even send notifications to external recipients if you added them to an email-enabled group, although this might be a less common scenario. It could also be an automated system mailbox that processes the notifications and forwards them to an on-call employee or takes other actions. Whatever your requirements, sending refresh failure notifications to others in addition to the dataset owner is helpful to ensure issues get noticed and addressed in a timely manner.

You can also uncheck the ‘Send refresh failure notification emails to me‘ checkbox but keep the additional recipients in the ‘Email these users when the refresh fails‘ textbox. In this configuration, Power BI keeps sending refresh notifications to the specified recipients but excludes the dataset owner. This configuration might be useful for custom solutions based on the Power BI REST API that maintain datasets programmatically by using a dedicated user account with an unmonitored mailbox. It could also be useful if the owner of the dataset changes frequently, but you want to ensure that a fixed set of recipients continues to receive the notifications.

If you don’t want to generate any refresh notifications by emails, make sure the ‘Send refresh failure notification emails to me‘ checkbox is unchecked and the ‘Email these users when the refresh fails’ textbox is empty.

And that’s it! Sending refresh notifications to others can deliver significant value, enabling you to monitor your scheduled refreshes more reliably and more effortlessly than before. It is a much-requested feature with hundreds of votes across multiple suggestions.

www.allonline365.com

Resource Credit | Microsoft Power BI