Power BI October 2023 Feature Summary

What no video (again)?? I think videos have been confined to the “too hard bucket” ??? I am OK with that, the blog Power BI October 2023 Feature Summary | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI is an easy enough read if you have time or you can skim through my summary below.

If you are wondering what the picture above is by the way, it is my attempt at creating bullet charts with standard visuals.? Please get in touch if you want to know how it is done.

Reporting

Power BI Desktop OneDrive and SharePoint integration.? This is now general release but I don’t see a massive benefit with it.? Perhaps I am missing something

On-object Interaction Updates.? There are a few of these and the On-object interaction continues to be improved.? We (I for one) need to get used to it!

Power BI Home in Desktop.? ??? I didn’t get this.? I think it is an error and we see a picture of what looks like the home screen in the service (which did recently improve).

Deduplication rules for composite models on Power BI Datasets and Analysis Services offer handy improvements for limited use cases.

Modeling

The updates to “Edit your data model in the Power BI Service” are welcome and get us one step closer to being able to do everything in the service.?

But, in this same section, we get the Model explorer public preview in the Desktop (which differentiates the Desktop further).? This is a quite significant change which heralds less reliance on external tools like Tabular Editor but, again, I would suggest the use cases are limited for the “citizen developer”.

Data connectivity

It is always good to see connectors being added and improved

Service

OneLake data hub .? This is handy but I am not sure how much I will use it.? How many ways do we need to find things?? One would do if it works well methinks.

The addition of the ability to create a customized deployment pipeline of 2-10 stages is very welcome.? You want an extra “PRE_PROD” stage or you just want DEV and PROD?? You can now do this, thanks Microsoft!? You cannot edit an existing pipeline though.? You would need to delete and recreate.

Deployment pipeline multi-tasking gets mentioned in this section too.? Multi-tasking is a thing that appeared in the service without me really noticing it – just extra icons that appear on the left-hand side navigation panel but they are handy.? It would be nice if they were visually separated from the standard icons though and if we could get rid of the standard icons that we don’t use.

Visualizations

This section always advertises new third party visuals in AppSource.? I have not used one of these for several years and my experience with them has been less than favourable every time I have considered using one.? Not to say you won’t have a need for one at some stage and there may be some that are very good indeed.? It’s just the ones that I have tried have either performed badly or not behaved like standard visuals and not always had the same properties as standard visuals.