Power BI's 2023 Revolution

Over the past few years Power BI has made significant strides as a business intelligence tool. Although there’s still a whole posts worth of basic features that are yet to be implemented like fixed column widths on matrixes (a topic I'm saving for a rainy day) the updates from the last 12 months have been remarkable, making it increasingly difficult for other BI tools to compete, except in very specific use cases. In this blog post, I will delve into a few areas that I believe will supercharge Power BI in the coming year for both developers and users.

I highly recommend keeping up with the monthly Power BI updates if you don’t already, and even more importantly, following this blog (naturally) and the INFuse social media channels to stay informed about new releases. Each update has the potential to significantly boost your productivity, and when combined, they can be game-changing.

The Big AI Disruption

My colleagues might be rolling their eyes as they read this as they’re well aware, but I am unapologetically overly enthusiastic about AI as a technology and its potential impact. I genuinely believe it will bring about transformative changes in the long run, surpassing even the influence of the internet and occurring at a staggering pace. If you’re not at least considering AI seriously then it’s going to seriously disrupt you and the way you work rather than be an opportunity.

A - Co-pilot, Co-pilot X, and Office Integration

While the potential of AI is virtually limitless, let's focus on a more immediate and relevant field. A few weeks ago, I shared in an email my prediction that natural language functionality would be capable of handling complex data engineering tasks in Azure within the next year. Surprisingly, within a week of my prediction, Microsoft/GitHub announced Co-pilot X, which integrates with your code repository, Visual Studio, and other tools, enabling AI-assisted coding within the context of your application. Although my prediction has not yet fully materialised (and has a long way to go), this significant advancement took place much faster than I anticipated.

Co-pilot represents more than just a single feature; it's Microsoft's moniker for its entire suite of upcoming AI functionalities. These capabilities range from creating apps based on your data context simply by talking to the software, to composing emails and crafting presentations. While Power BI hasn't officially showcased any of these features yet, as a key Microsoft product and the flagship of the Power Platform, we can expect significant advancements soon.

Imagine saying, "Hey, Co-pilot, can you create a report for me that displays 'X' from this dataset, and email me every time there's an update?" And just like that, it happens. While human-developed reports will still be necessary for larger-scale projects that require translating a wide variety of business processes, this new AI-driven approach will revolutionise quick and easy data access. It's essentially self-serve reporting on steroids.

In the short term, we can anticipate enhancements to the Q&A and Smart Narrative visuals, as well as increased promotion of these features.

B – Natural Language Dax

DAX is to Power BI what formulas are to Excel— absolutely essential for displaying calculations on your page. Fortunately, Power BI handles most simple calculations automatically. However, many of the more complex calculations required to drive functionality or reproduce specific metrics can be challenging for users. But there's a feature in Power BI that generates queries just by describing what you want, and although it's currently tucked away under a few clicks, it's likely to become more prominent as its capabilities improve.

Improvements to Power BI Development

In the blog post for the March 2023 monthly update the Power BI team write about how there are two things that they see as causing issues, based on feedback and their own experience:

1 - Power BI development is not intuitive and confuses new users (it confuses me too!)

2 - Power BI doesn’t match the design and UX of the rest of the office suite.

Power BI has been in a state of redesign since it’s conception and slowly over the time has evolved to become much more efficient and intuitive that it once was. This month the next iteration of that evolution has been introduced as a preview feature. This feature called ‘On-object detection’ (catchy name) will, they believe, help account for the two issues mentioned above.

On-object detection doesn’t really do anything to explain what that is though so let’s see at how the design experience now looks.

When this feature is enabled you’ll no longer find a visualisation pane on the right as standard. Instead you get a menu that pops up next to each individual visualisation which contains everything you’ll need to get started and then there’s a ‘more options’ prompt which provides the usual formatting bar. That right panel is now collapsed and gives you the option to swap between a view of your fields and formatting options. Just like the selection pane the data and formatting panes can now be hidden or shown by selecting or deselecting them at the top.

Also on occasion, and I can’t figure out exactly how it works, you are able to click directly on the element you want to adjust and the relevant formatting options appear. E.g. you click on the data labels or the title and you immediately get the options to change them. This is extremely helpful and I’m already finding it more efficient to click between the visuals like that.

Immediately the additional space you get to see the canvas is a huge benefit and I do think this is a step in the right direction but as someone who has been living inside of Power BI for the past few years it’s like coming home and finding the rooms of your house in a different order to how you left them. It’s going to take a while to adjust and get used to the new way to find things and that presents some frustrations but I can imagine it is more intuitive for new users, especially as it should now be more similar with building visualisation in something like Excel at the beginning.

You don’t need to enable this feature right now but I have. It will be pushed as the standard some point later this year and I wouldn’t count on being able to switch it. If you’re an experienced Power BI user you just have to decide when you want the headache of relearning things! Maybe hold off for now though as I’ve definitely encountered a few bugs which should be resolved by next month.?

Improvements to Power BI Service & More Pagination

I won’t go too in-depth as these are more my personal predictions and have gone into more detail in previous posts like January ‘What’s in store for 2023’ (which amazingly needed this update 2 months later) and the post about Power Bi pro licencing now covering paginated reports.

A – The Power BI service

The Power BI service is, I believe, going to grow to become a much more feature rich environment for developers and users capable of self-serving analytics. Natural language as I likely to be used everywhere it can be so don’t be surprised to see now chatboxes on the home page where users simply ask for data, at which point either an existing dashboard, report, or app will be provided or if they’re not available then intelligently generated solutions built instantly using the context of the datasets sat there already.

Outside the scope of AI the roadmap is indicating additions that will make it possible to do more development from the service itself. It’s already partially possible but soon I expect to see the option to use Power Query online and the modelling canvas as well.

B – Pagination, pagination, pagination

This is more of a hope than anything that’s on the official roadmap hence why it’s a last though on the blog posts but I would like to see more organisations making use of paginated reporting now that it’s possible on the standard BI licencing.

Paginated reports are fantastic at displaying data in a very fixed way, for example one table repeated on multiple pages listing exam scores, and each page being for one student in a class. For organisations that use SSRS then it makes sense to ditch any licencing costs associated with that and?(where appropriate) migrate the reports over to be alongside the rest of the business intelligence. The data required for these reports can then be used to drive automations, or integrated into the Power BI metrics feature which lets you monitor KPIs from across all your data sets.

For a full look into paginated reporting in Power BI check out our post here.

Conclusion

First, I apologize for the fact that out of the three posts this year, this is another one just brimming with excitement about the incredible developments taking place rather than a guide on how to make use of them. Some of these advancements are so ground-breaking and have emerged so rapidly that overlooking them would result in not sharing some of the most transformative changes Power BI may experience in its lifetime.

2023 promises to be a revolutionary year for Power BI, with ground-breaking advancements in AI, natural language processing, and development improvements poised to redefine the way we interact with data and create reports. As Co-pilot and its AI-powered features continue to evolve, we'll witness a shift towards more intuitive and user-friendly experiences within the Power BI ecosystem.

With the anticipated enhancements to the Power BI service reporting the platform is set to become even more versatile, catering to a wider range of business needs. While it's essential for seasoned Power BI users to adapt to these changes, the improvements will surely make the platform more accessible to new users and streamline the report creation process for everyone.

As we continue to navigate these exciting developments staying informed and embracing the changes is crucial. By following this blog and staying engaged with the Power BI community, you'll be well-prepared to harness the full potential of these innovations and remain at the forefront of business intelligence.

Thank you once again for reading, see you next month.

Nick