Last week there was not a lot on the go, but it seems to have picked up this week, so here are the latest insights.

Power BI – August Power BI Desktop Update

As I am sure some of you would have already seen and heard and I personally have to echo what other people have said, it is great to see how the Power BI team, as well as Microsoft take on board the issues and problems that their users face, and in this instance how quickly they have made the change, so that we can get not only the new functionality. But as requested also have the ability to use the older functionality also.

What I am referring to here is the Drill experience.

So you can use the double down arrow which will do the previous experience which will show the next level of the hierarchy.

And the new experience which is the split arrow which will perform the new inline hierarchy experience.

You can find the details here: August Power BI Desktop Update: Updated Drill experience

Power BI – Future state (Download Report) & Snap to Grid

As you can see with the image below on certain versions of the Power BI Service they have started provisioning the ability to download your Power BI report as a PBIX file. Which will be a great addition.

Next you can see that they have started working on the Snap to Grid functionality which is another great addition which will be available sometime in the near future.

Power BI – IntelliSense coming to Power Query

Just a quick update that IntelliSense is coming to Power Query, I have been working in the nuts and bolts of Power Query and this will be a very welcome addition.

Power BI – Training


There are some great free training available to get into Power BI, as you can see above there is a “Dashboard in an Hour” as well as “Dashboard in a Day”. Not only that but there is also a really great and valuable edX course (which I have already completed) which offers some great content and learning experiences.

You can find the details about the different options here: Power BI Dashboard in a Day and Dashboard in an Hour training near you

Power BI – WebTuna Content Pack

Here is another content pack, this time from WebTuna, which is an on-demand service for alerting and monitoring the performance of your internet or internet sits. And I am sure due to the nature of the business model as well as analytics in terms of usage and where it is coming from this will give some great insights into their customers data.

You can find all the details here: Explore your WebTuna Data with Power BI

Power BI – Building a Real-Time IoT Dashboard

In this blog post from the Microsoft Power BI team they show you how to setup, configure and create a real-time IoT dashboard.

Whilst the concept is very basic (which I think is a good thing to start learning) it also shows how powerful this can actually be.

You can find the details here: Building a Real-time IoT Dashboard with Power BI: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

Power BI – Tracking Changes in PBIX files

This is a blog post from Helen Gore, where they have created something that appears to be very simple, but actually is very powerful.

What she explains in her blog post is how they track changes in their Power BI Desktop (PBIX) files, so that when other people are working on the same file, they know what the previous changes were.

You can find all the details here: HOW TO TRACK CHANGES IN POWER BI DESKTOP

Power BI – Chris Webb – Loading Data from Multiple Excel Workbooks saved in OneDrive

This is an excellent blog post from Chris Webb where he shows how to not only load multiple Excel Workbooks, but ones that are saved on OneDrive Personal or OneDrive for Business, as well as ensuring that they get refreshed on your schedule.

I will not go into all the details, as you can read them on his blog post here: Loading Data From Multiple Excel Workbooks Into Power BI–And Making Sure Data Refresh Works After Publishing

Power BI – SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) Solution Template

If my memory serves me correctly this is the second Power BI Solution Template from the Microsoft Power BI team.

And this time it is for SCCM, and having worked with this data in the past, it is really great to see how easily it can be used to show insights into your SCCM data. As well as it does appear that you can integrate 3rd party information in SCCM also.

You can find the details here: Announcing the Power BI solution template for System Center Configuration Manager

SQL Server – SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) Integrated Workspace Mode

This is a great update for SSDT and the modelling experience when working with SSAS Tabular models. You now can use an integrated workspace, which means you do not have to connect to an SSAS Tabular Server.

The thing to note is that you might need additional memory, as well as they highlight in the blog post drivers for both 32bit and 64bit depending on the version of SSDT.

You can find the details here: Introducing Integrated Workspace Mode for SQL Server Data Tools for Analysis Services Tabular Projects (SSDT Tabular)

SQL Server – SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) Update

Here is the monthly update for SSMS, and there are quite a few updates in this release.

You can find all the details here: Download SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

SQL Server – Report Builder Update

It appears that for SQL Server 2016 the report builder will be following a similar release process as SSMS and SSDT where there will be more frequent updates to report builder.

I am sure that this will enable a lot of future updates and enhancements for report builder.

You can find the details here: SQL Server 2016 Report Builder update now available