Planned Power BI Release Wave Summary

April 2020 through September 2020

by

Ross McNeely

Practice Manager, Enterprise Data Management

Microsoft published the “What’s new” list for a wave of features planned for release between April 2020 through September 2020. We have created a visual of those planned release features. This helps to highlight the volume of features focused for Power BI Desktop and Power BI Services. We also want to call out a couple of key features that we know clients have been requesting.

PBI Super Users will be getting a break from needing to fork the report to see the data their way. Public preview is set for April 2020 for ‘Visual personalization for end users’. It will allow users who want a small change to a visual like attributes on an axis, or the visual type. General availability is still TBD, so don’t make to many promises yet.

Any Power BI developer who has worked with Buttons knows the benefits. They also know the difficulties of users requesting several Buttons in a single page. That is why we’re hopeful that the new ‘Drillthrough buttons’ features will help out. It will allow developers to include drillthrough as an action option for buttons. GA is in April 2020.

Any feature that is going to help with refreshes deserves to be called out as a key feature. ‘Incremental refresh’ is set to be GA in May 2020, and it can not get here soon enough. This will allow for a partial data refresh of say the last week, and not the entire 5 years of data. Especially painful when you are dealing with volatile legacy connections. An added benefit is resource demand (memory, compute) is reduced.

How many requests do you get to format the totals, and subtotals in matrices? Starting in July 2020 with the general availability of ‘Conditional formatting for totals and subtotals’ you can begin work on the backlog of requests. Developers can apply conditional formatting to totals and subtotals like background color, font color, data bars, and icons formatted by color scale, rules, and field value. There’s more… developers will be able to set the hierarchy level they want the formatting to apply on.

Many more features like PBI Mobile Dark mode… check them out here.