Microsoft Power BI November 2024 Update

The Power BI update was released on 12th November – the earliest day in the month I can remember.?

The video is 27 minutes long but the video and the blog are (at the time of writing) out of synch.? There are things that appear in the video and not the blog and vice versa.? Seems like it was another rushed release to me!

Power BI November 2024 Feature Summary (blog)

Power BI Update - November 2024 (video)

My highlights:

Path Layer for the Azure Map visual

This is one of those “cool” updates that will be useful in real life for a very small minority of use cases.? It’s definitely handy to be able to do route maps but I have never needed to produce one for a client.? Taxi firms, logistics and shipping companies may have some use cases I suspect.

Small multiples for the new card visual (Preview)

This feature was mentioned in the blog only and I think it is a good one.? The new card visual is already a powerful visual and adding small multiple capability to it takes it to another level.? This could be very handy when putting status monitoring dashboards together.? If you are not sure what small multiples are and why they might benefit, please get in touch.

New visual – text slicer (Preview)

This is another feature that was mentioned in the blog only and it is definitely a useful new visual.? It could do with some improvements like not having to press the button to make it apply.?

Also there are now four slicers in Power BI and three of them are “New”.? Somewhat confusing and I hope they rationalise them.?

OneLake catalog

This feature was mentioned in the video but not the blog!? Also I am not quite sure why it is in the Power BI update as it is more a Fabric thing and I also think the name is a bit misleading and cryptic.? It’s all about being able to browse and find Fabric items more easily in the service (maybe “Fabric catalog” would be more fitting).?

Tabular Model Development Language (TMDL)

For a professional developer this is going to make life easier and faster when creating or maintaining semantic models.? For the majority of Power BI newbies that are attracted to the tool because they don’t have to understand programming, I would advise to steer clear.? You don’t have to use it and it will be easy to mess things up!? It is a preview feature with limitations too so be aware.

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So a bit of a mixed bag of useful stuff, gimmicky bits (mostly not mentioned above) and bloopers from Microsoft this month! ??

Until the next one,

Ian