Microsoft released latest Power BI update on the 19 May, the full details can be found on the Power BI blog. There are lots of interesting features in this month’s update but here are a few that caught my eye.  

Microsoft have also updated the Fabric Roadmap so if you are interested in what is coming for Fabric and Power BI it is worth a look.   

Copilot 

There are lots of enhancements to the Copilot experience for end users and for developers preparing models to work with Copilot.  

These include the ability to add business context for example when busy periods are or translate terms that are in common use in the organisation, exclude tables and columns from the data Copilot looks at and predefine answers for common questions. You can also now flag if a “a semantic model as prepared for AI”.

Nearly all vendors are focused on creating an experience that allows users to ask questions of data but getting this experience to deliver trusted answers to business questions still takes work and these tools are welcome additions to Power BI to help with this.

Translytical task flows (Preview)

Creating Power BI reports where users can change variables to model different scenarios is not the simplest thing to do so the release of this new set of features that allows users to modify data opens a range of new options in this area. The feature includes a whole range of other options like annotations, notifications and workflows which allow reports to contain actions the user can take based on the data.

More information can be found at this page.

Line Charts

A great addition to line charts to allow the highlighting of specific segments. This will work well with the ability to annotate the charts in PowerPoint to help analysts call out key points in the data. Currently what you can do is limited to changing specific data points but hopefully this is a precursor to allowing conditional formatting based on the data in the line chart.

Field Parameters

I’m a big fan of field parameters and was pleased to see they have fixed the issue where when you change category it would reset the sort order e.g. if you had set it to be alphabetically for one category like country and then swapped to another like product it would not retain the alphabetic sorting but would swap to sorting on the value.

Conclusion

There are some welcome updates to long established features and some new ones with a lot of potential. Have you tried any of them? What was your experience?