As I have done each and every year I go through and give an overview of all the Power BI Announcements at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021.

This year once again they have announced some incredible features either available now or coming soon so, please read below.

Here are the links to the videos which have got more details than what is detailed in my blog post below, you will have to log in, but it is free!

Power BI (Peek into the future Part 1): Vision & Roadmap

Power BI (Peek into the future Part 2): Analytics for everyone

Massive Growth

It is amazing to see that each and every year Power BI just continues to grow and grow!

Power BI Community

I really am honoured to be part of the Power BI community which is also growing each and every year. It is great to see how we can all help out others.

Automated Insights

There are more AI insights coming into Power BI with automated insights, which will allow the user to see where there are anomalies, trend changes etc.

Teams Integration

More integration of Power BI reports into teams and even within a teams meeting

Soon you will also be able to pin the Power BI App inside Teams

Excel Integration with Power BI Datasets

You can now connect directly to Power BI datasets in Excel.

Not only that you can soon also interact with the Excel file in Web without having to run the Excel application.

Power Automate Visual in Power BI Reports

Power Automate to create an approval from a Power BI Report

Goals

Driven by data, built for Teams, AI Powered and you can have automated action with Power Automate on the goals.

Introducing Goals in Power BI

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Streaming dataflows

Match streaming data and batch data where you can integrate within the Power BI Service, and you can join datasets, aggregate items all within one single area using Azure Stream analytics!

Halo Lens

Can use the Halo Lens within your working environment to interact with Power BI reports. It will show the report and remember those reports where you were in the actual real environment

Power BI Spatial Anchoring

By using the Mobile App, you can now integrate into a physical space and see the Power BI reports as shown below.

Drill through on visuals

On hovering over a visual it will now show you that you can drill through

Paginated Reports Custom Visual within a Power BI Report

You can now use the paginated report as a custom visual to interact with the paginated report.

Sparkline’s in tables with line and bar charts

Bookmark Navigator

Page Navigation

Custom Navigation Option

Show or hide pages with Roles

Whilst this feature allows you to show or hide pages based on a role, this is still not effectively Row Level Security, the pages are just hidden. If you want to secure your data always use Row Level Security on the relevant tables.

Quick Create from SharePoint Lists

Now when in SharePoint you can create a Power BI report directly from the SharePoint list on the Web.

New data prevention capabilities

The data is inherited from when created in Azure, through to the Power BI reports and even if used in an Excel file it will be protected.

Automatic Aggregations

With automatic aggregations it will create aggregations based on the query patterns of the users. It is a self-learning self-optimizing system.

You can also view and see how the automatic aggregations have impacted the query performance.

Hybrid tables

This is amazing where you can have a single table which is automatically created with different data refresh requirements.

As shown below the older data is imported.

The more recent data is using incremental refresh to keep it up to date.

And finally, the current day query is using DirectQuery to keep it near real-time for analysis!

Summary

That was a lot to cover and once again the Power BI team have excelled with what they have offered!

If I had to pick one new feature it would be the hybrid tables or the Sparkline’s.

Thanks for reading and let me know which was your favourite new feature?