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Learn about what's new in the latest versions of Power BI Report Server and Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server. This article covers the major feature areas and is updated with each new release. For more about what's new in Power BI Report Server, see the Change log for Power BI Report Server.
Download Power BI Report Server and Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server.
Reminder: How you can find your report server product key
Read the Power BI blog post, Power BI Report Server September 2024 Feature Summary for details.
Download large semantic models New INFO functions DAX query view is available in live connect Add or update multiple measures in DAX query view
Read the Power BI blog post, Power BI Report Server May 2024 Feature Summary for details.
A focus of this release is on accessibility. Power BI customers will notice a continuation in the work done in the previous year. We continue to provide more inclusivity for both creators and consumers in 2024.
We've made it easier for report consumers with visual impairments to get tabular data for all visuals on a page with one selection. We're displaying the data in ways that best meet their needs with show visuals as tables, an added menu item. We promised better looking reports. We're delivering extended data labels and more styling options that improve aesthetics for column and bar charts. These changes are an added benefit for neurodivergent individuals with cognitive disabilities.
Leveraging previous accessibility improvements to table and matrix, we're introducing a new view mode called Show visuals as tables. It displays report visuals in a tabular format with a single action. Users might prefer to consume data in a text-based or tabular format depending on their learning styles and use of assistive technologies. This supplemental format for visuals allows users to display the data in the way that best meets their needs.
This new view mode is similar to how Show as a table displays underlying data for individual visuals today. Show visuals as tables displays the underlying data for visuals for all pages in the current report, with the added functionality of interaction and cross-filtering capabilities.
To activate this view mode, navigate to the View dropdown menu and select Show visuals as tables.
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+F11 to toggle between the two views.
This month brings new formatting enhancements for column and bar charts in Power BI. These additions can improve your data visualization, enabling more impactful analysis and storytelling capabilities. Here's a list of the new features available now.
These features aim to provide you with greater flexibility and creative freedom in presenting your data, ensuring that your insights stand out with clarity and style. Enjoy exploring these new capabilities and crafting compelling narratives with your data in Power BI. For comprehensive information, see this blog post about new features for column and bar charts.
Data labels have more options, too. Discover new enhanced capabilities for data labels that give you extended customization choices to seamlessly match your reporting needs. They bring integration of additional goals, dramatically improving your data analysis experience. Here are this month’s highlights.
Explore these new features of data labels to increase the data density in your charts. These advancements are available for column, bar, line, and ribbon charts.
For more detailed information, see the blog post about these new data label features.
Remember that the Power BI Report Server release cadence is September, January, and May.
Welcome to the September 2023 Power BI Report Server release. This release focuses on new features that enhance viewing, like the Report Server mobile view port improvements, full screen for PBIX and RDL report viewing, and mobile layout switcher. We're excited to support Power BI Desktop Developer mode for developers, and bubble range scaling for reporting. These features have been inclusively designed with better UX for report viewing and sharing. Read on for the details.
You've asked for the ability to allow your report consumers to present reports in full-screen mode. We're excited to share that we've fulfilled this request. The full-screen viewing option has been added to the View menu for Power BI (.pbix) reports and to the toolbar for paginated (.rdl) reports.
In a Power BI report: To change the view, on the View menu item, select Full screen as shown in the following image.
Full-screen view in a Power BI report
In a paginated (.rdl) report: We added full-screen view to the toolbar. It's located on the far right side of the pagination toolbar, as shown in the following image.
Full-screen view in paginated (.rdl) report
Customers log in to Power BI Report Server with varying devices. We've enhanced the view port for smaller screens to make viewing reports more accessible. Users no longer need to scroll across to locate menu items. The view port has a responsive design enabled for smaller viewers. Additional menu items are collapsed to accommodate the smaller screen size.
Collapsed menu items
We’ve added new buttons in Power BI Desktop that make it easy to switch quickly between web and mobile layouts while you’re developing reports. The new switcher buttons are in the lower-left corner of the screen, next to the page navigator.
New layout switcher from web to mobile layout
In this latest update, we've made the mobile canvas interactive.
With this new capability, you can test how buttons, slicers, and visuals behave in the app before you publish the report.
This canvas interactivity means that your report users can now interact with visuals directly. They can adjust table and matrix column headers to make them fit perfectly in mobile screens.
We're introducing the new bubble range scaling setting for scatter chart and map visuals. This setting gives report creators more control over how the bubble (marker) sizes respond to the data, making it more accurate or distinctive, based on preference.
With the magnitude option, the bubble areas closely follow the data proportions. With the data-range option, the bubble size limits are mapped to data minimum and maximum. The auto option is the default setting for new reports. It selects the appropriate option based on data characteristics. For more information, see Scatter charts, bubble charts, and dot plot charts in Power BI
You can adjust this setting in the Format pane in Power BI Desktop.
For reports authored in earlier Power BI versions, these settings default to (Deprecated) for scatter charts, which differs in handling negative values, and Data range for maps.
Azure Maps will also include this feature in a coming product update.
In the following figure, the size of each country represents Urban Population, which is also shown on the y-axis.
This release has a number of new features like the Report Server accessibility tagging for screen-reader report consumers, new accessibility for matrix navigation and selection, and updates to existing features for modeling and reporting. See the Power BI Report Server May 2023 blog for all the details.
Accessibility options are new features for report authors. You can enable them from the Power BI Report Builder authoring tool. Accessibility options for row properties allow report authors to tag rows for headers and data cells within a paginated report.
Text box properties work similarly to row properties. They allow report authors to tag heading elements to text boxes within a paginated report. To enable text box properties, right-click a text box to select the Accessibility menu and determine which structure type you wish to overwrite.
See the Power BI Report Server May 2023 blog for details about these feature updates.
Format image dimensions individually in tables and matrixes.
Decide which report pages are visible in the Page navigator visual.
Apply all slicers button, Clear all slicers button, and Optimization presets update
Accessibility improvements
New DAX functions LINEST and LINESTX. These functions are especially useful in predicting unknown values (Y) given known values (X).
New DAX functions RANK and ROWNUMBER. These functions return a number indicating the rank for the current context within the specified partition, sorted by the specified order.
This release has updates for the Report Server web portal, modeling, and reporting. See the Power BI Report Server January 2023 blog for all the details.
In November 2022, Power BI announced the upcoming change in color accent to teal. This change was made to ensure our product is more accessible for users with disabilities. The new color improves contrast and increases visibility of the user interface in Power BI, making the experience easier to use and more inclusive. To align the on-premises Power BI Report Server with Power BI, the accent color for Power BI Report Server is now also teal in this latest release.
The Power BI brand color and icon logo remain yellow.
You can migrate reports without Report Server downtime or disruption to your report users. You don’t need to remove any data or reports. You can keep your current environment in place until you’re ready to retire it.
For sovereign clouds, you can update the Power BI endpoints by changing the site settings in the web portal.
See the Power BI Report Server blog post for January 2023 for details about these feature updates.
Query performance improvements
Unshared and unsynchronized axes for small multiples charts
Slicer type formatting moved to Format Pane.
DAX formula bar is now available in Desktop model view.
New DAX function: EVALUATEANDLOG
Making it easier to do comparison calculations:
This release introduces Power BI Report Server for SQL Server 2022. We continue to innovate, create, and design to give everyone the ability to achieve more. Designing for inclusion reflects how people adapt to the world around them. In this new release of Power BI Report Server, we've done a lot of accessibility work to make sure we're empowering everyone. The release includes:
We've improved the Power BI Report Server portal to provide a more inclusive modern graphical interface, making it easier to deliver meaningful reporting on your data from a web-based experience. In the portal, you can view Power BI reports, paginated reports, Excel files, and KPIs, and navigate through the elements in your report server instance. You can also use the web portal to administer a single report server instance.
Report Server 2022 has a number of new options for setting system properties on the report server. The article Server Properties Advanced Page - Power BI Report Server & Reporting Services explains how to set them in SQL Server Management Studio. Each of the links in this section takes you to that option in the article.
Branding options to add a custom hyperlink, CustomUrlLabel and CustomUrlValue:
Exclude/included Client IP Address when INFO Logging in Enabled:
List view by default option in catalog:
See the Reporting section of the Power BI Report Server September 2022 blog for details about these features.
See the Modeling section of the Power BI Report Server September 2022 blog for details about this new DAX function.
See the Other section of the Power BI Report Server September 2022 blog for details about these features.
The May 2022 update of Power BI Report Server brings many new enhancements, including dynamic format strings support, bookmark navigators, and updated slicer defaults. Here’s a list of new and updated features with links to each. Or read the whole Power BI Report Server blog post for May 2022.
Here’s a list of new and updated features. For details, see the Power BI Report Server blog post for January 2022.
Here’s a list of new and updated features. For details, see the Power BI Report Server blog post for September 2021.
Here’s a list of new and updated features. For details, see the Power BI Report Server blog post for May 2021.
Highlighted new features
Here are highlights of the new features in Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server.
Other new and updated features
Reporting
Analytics
Modeling
Other
What follows is a list of new and updated features. For details, see the Power BI Report Server blog post for January 2021.
Here are some highlights of new features.
Power BI reports
Data connectivity
We've updated the way that connection metadata is stored in the .pbix file format in October. This update is part of a long-term journey to make .pbix files more programmatically accessible and editable. We've already enabled the change in the version of Power BI Desktop that releases monthly in line with the Power BI service. We're previewing the changes in this release of Power BI Desktop for Report Server, starting this month.
Starting with this release you'll see the following notification prompting you to turn on the preview and upgrade to the enhanced format:
"Coming soon--turn on the enhanced metadata format preview to get better performance and security updates in Power BI."
Note the following:
As an administrator, you can disable this preview, force V3 off, and hide the preview feature check box. Set the following DWORD value to 0 in the registry: AllowV3Models in either:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Microsoft Power BI Desktop SSRS]
"AllowV3Models"=dword:00000000
or
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Microsoft Power BI Desktop SSRS]
"AllowV3Models"=dword:00000000
See Using enhanced dataset metadata for more information.
Browser support deprecation
If you're using Edge Legacy or Internet Explorer 11, it's time to upgrade your browser. Support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy browser stopped beginning March 9, 2021, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 will stop beginning August 17, 2021.
You'll see a warning in the Power BI Report Server web portal that Internet Explorer 11 is being deprecated. Time to upgrade. See Browser support for Power BI Report Server for details.
New product icon
Power BI Report Server has a new product icon, in keeping with the new icons rolling out across all Microsoft products.
What follows is a complete list of new and updated features. For details, see the Power BI Report Server blog post for October 2020.
Here are some highlights of new features.
Modern ribbon
The modern ribbon has come to Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server. We'll continue to make additions and add more features to the ribbon. See Use the updated ribbon in Power BI Desktop to learn more about its changes and benefits.
Hierarchy slicers
You can build what's called a hierarchy slicer to filter multiple related fields in a single slicer. Now that it's generally available, it benefits from added functionality:
See Slicers in Power BI in the documentation for details.
Mobile authoring enhancements
In this release we're introducing an improved mobile layout authoring experience and more mobile layout capabilities. As more organizations have adopted the Power BI mobile apps, we've received feedback asking for more capabilities and improvements for the mobile authoring experience. The enhancements in this release will help you more easily build compelling, interactive reports optimized for mobile devices.
Here are the new experiences and capabilities for building mobile-optimized reports:
See this blog post, Enhancements to mobile authoring, for details.
Data Preparation: Automatic table detection from Excel files
This new feature of the Excel connector automatically identifies sections of each Excel spreadsheet to extract into a table. It shows them under a “Suggested Tables” group in the Navigator. Previously, data had to be formatted as a table or named range in Excel. Otherwise you had to scrape the relevant rows/columns with specific transforms, such as skip rows and remove columns, from worksheet objects, as in Sheet1 in the following example. To use this feature, you need to enable it in the Settings dialog box.
Modeling: Enhanced Dataset Metadata
In the past, only loadable queries generated in Power Query were mapped to the data model. Now all queries are mapped to objects in the data model. The queries are regenerated based off the data model when you open that .pbix file.
This backend update has unlocked future feature improvements and will continue to do so.
For example:
If you have an older .pbix that can't automatically update, for reasons such as unapplied changes, you need to successfully upgrade your model before you can make any other modeling changes.
Support for Windows 7 ends
After 10 years, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020. In line with this change, we stopped support for Power BI Desktop on Windows 7 on January 31, 2021. Power BI Desktop is only supported on Windows 8 and newer. The January 2021 release of Power BI Desktop optimized for Report Server will be supported according to the Modern Lifecycle Policy. In other words, it's fully supported until the next release (currently scheduled for May 2021). After May 2021, it will only receive security updates until January 2022. All support will stop after January 2022. See the Power BI Report Server support timeline for details.
Complete list of updates
Here’s a complete list of the updates in the October edition of Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server.
Reporting
Modern ribbon
Canvas watermarks
Total labels for stacked visuals
Added general visual option to maintain layer order
Gradient legend
Relative time filter
Ability to further customize slicer header text
Hierarchical slicer improvements
Mobile authoring enhancements
Visualizations
Modeling
Data preparation
Other
Change data source connection strings in Power BI reports with PowerShell
In the October release of Power BI Report Server, we're enabling the ability to update connections for Power BI reports for DirectQuery and Refresh. This ability is also a breaking change in how you could set it up in previous releases. To learn more, see Change data source connection strings in Power BI reports with PowerShell - Power BI Report Server.
Among the highlights of this update are the hierarchical slicer and decomposition tree visuals, and query diagnostics. What follows is a complete list of new and updated features. For details, see the Power BI Report Server blog post for May 2020.
Hierarchical slicer
New action types for buttons:
Buttons now support fill images
Multi-column sort for tables
Dual axis for line charts
Rectangle selection for visuals
Conditional formatting for totals and subtotals in tables and matrices
Customize theme dialog
Conditional formatting discoverability
Decomposition tree
Filter pane updates:
New DAX functions:
Standard DAX separators
The API version shipped with this release is 3.2.
See the Power BI Report Server January 2020 blog post for more details.
This release brings many new features, such as conditional formatting for buttons, data profiling enhancements, and more formatting settings for KPIs and table visuals. Here's a summarized list of updates:
Reporting
Analytics
Data preparation
Other
Reporting
Set a table column or matrix value as a custom URL
You can set a table column or matrix value as a custom URL. You find this new option under the conditional formatting card in the formatting pane.
KPI visual formatting settings
With this month's release, KPIs have new formatting options:
You can conditionally format some of these new formatting options:
Filter pane experience updates
As part of the general availability of the new filter experience from the last release, we have streamlined the process to transition current reports to the new pane. When you open Power BI Report Server for the first time, you see a filter pane auto-update dialog. These updates also include banners in Report Server when reports need to be migrated to the new experience.
Analytics
Conditional formatting for buttons
These conditional formatting updates are all button related. You can now dynamically set formatting for the following properties:
Load more for Analyze insights
When running the Analyze feature to find insights in your data, such as Explain the increase, we only run the machine-learning models for a set period of time to show you insights in a timely manner. If there's a lot of data to analyze, you can now choose to continue to run the analysis after the initial timeout.
New DAX function: Quarter
This month, we have a new DAX function, Quarter. The Quarter function returns the quarter corresponding to a specified date.
Data preparation
Data profiling enhancements
This month we're introducing a couple of significant enhancements to our Data Profiling capabilities within the Power Query Editor, including:
Filter options
You could already leverage several type-specific grouping criteria within the Column Profiles distribution pane. Now, you can also filter from within the callouts for each of the values in the distribution chart when grouping criteria is applied. For example, from the Data Profiles pane for a Date/DateTime column, you can exclude all values that fall in a given Month.
Other
New file format: .pbids
This month we're releasing a new file format: .pbids, to streamline the "Get Data" experience for report creators in your organization. We recommend that admins create these files for commonly used connections.
When a report creator opens a .pbids file, Power BI Desktop prompts for authentication to connect to the data source specified in the file. Then the user selects the tables to load into the model. They may also need to select the database if one was not specified in the file. From there, the report creator can start building visualizations.
Find details and examples in the Using .pbids files to get data section of the "Data sources in Power BI Desktop" article.
Performance improvements for modeling operations
We have made a performance improvement in the Analysis Services engine to speed up modeling operations such as adding measures or calculated columns and creating relationships. The amount of improvement you see depends on the model, but we have seen 20x performance improvement for some customers for actions like opening a file and adding a measure.
That's all for the January 2020 release of Power BI Report Server. Continue sending feedback, and don't forget to vote for features that you'd like to see in the Power BI.
Exporting to Excel from a Power BI report in Power BI Report Server now works the same as exporting to Excel from a Power BI report in the Power BI service. You can export directly to the Excel .xlsx format, and the export limit is 150 K rows.
You can now host a database catalog used for Power BI Report Server in an Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI) that's hosted either in a VM or in your data center. Support is limited to using database credentials for the connection to SQL MI.
You can connect to Power BI datasets using either Microsoft Report Builder or SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). Then you can publish those reports to Power BI Report Server using SQL Server Analysis Services connectivity. Users need to use a stored Windows user name and password to enable the scenario.
When authoring reports, you can use tooltips to specify text for each element on the report. Screen reader technologies will use these tooltips.
With Azure Active Directory Application Proxy, you no longer need to manage your own web application proxy in order to allow secure access via the web or mobile apps. See Remote access to on-premises applications through Azure Active Directory's Application Proxy for more information.
Sets header values for all URLs matching the specified regex pattern. Users can update the custom header value with valid XML to set header values for selected request URLs. Admins can add any number of headers in the XML. See CustomHeaders in the Reporting Services Server Properties Advanced Page article for details.
Power BI Report Server now supports Transparent Database Encryption for the Power BI Report Server catalog database for Enterprise and Standard editions.
The API version shipped with this release is 2.6.0.
The newly released version of Report Builder is fully compatible with the 2016, 2017, and 2019 versions of Reporting Services. It's also compatible with all released and supported versions of Power BI Report Server.
See the Power BI Report Server September 2019 blog post for details about all the new features.
The September 2019 update of Power BI Report Server is packed with lots of Power BI report features. Here are some of the highlights:
Here's the complete list of features.
Custom format strings
Conditional formatting updates for formatting options
Conditional formatting warnings
Drillthrough discoverability improvement
New DAX expressions: REMOVEFILTERS and CONVERT
New DAX comparison operator: ==
See the Power BI Report Server May 2019 blog post for details about all the new features.
Here are some of the highlights of the release:
If your report runs slower than you expect, try the Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop. When you start it, it creates a log file with information about every action you take in the report. Read more about the Performance Analyzer.
In the new Modeling view in Power BI Desktop, you can view and work with complex datasets that contain many tables. Highlights include multiple diagram layouts and bulk editing of columns, measures, and tables. Read more about Modeling view.
You can now access data points on many of the built-in visuals using keyboard navigation. Read more about accessibility in Power BI reports.
Power BI reports are interactive. It makes sense that titles in a report would be dynamic, to reflect the current state of the report. You can use the same expression-bound formatting to make the URLs of your buttons, shapes, and images dynamic. Read more about expression-based titles.
Select the axis category labels in a visual to cross-highlight the other elements on a page, just as you would select the data points in a visual. Read more about cross-highlighting.
Here's the list of all the new features:
We've added support for Trusted Visuals to Power BI Report Server. Currently we support Mapbox and PowerOn visuals. ESRI, Visio, and PowerApps aren't supported for this release.)
RestrictedResourceMimeTypeForUpload, which admins can use to specify a comma-separated list of banned mime types, for example text/html.
Support for these features in Power BI reports:
Row-level security Setting up row-level security (RLS) with Power BI Report Server can restrict data access for given users. Filters restrict data access at the row level, and you can define filters within roles.
Expand and collapse on matrix row headers We've added the ability to expand and collapse individual row headers, one of the most requested visual features.
Copy and paste between .pbix files You can copy visuals between .pbix files, either from the visual’s context menu or with the standard Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut, and paste it into another report with Ctrl+V.
Smart alignment guides You see smart alignment guides when moving objects on your report page, like you see in PowerPoint, to help you align everything on your page. You see the smart guides anytime you drag or resize something on your page. When you move an object near another one, it snaps into a position aligned with the other object.
Accessibility features Too many accessibility features to list: for example, fields list pane accessibility support. The fields list pane is fully accessible. You can navigate around the pane using just your keyboard and a screen reader and use the context menu to add fields to your report page.
Administrators can set the following properties in SSMS Advanced Properties for the server farm:
AllowedResourceExtensionsForUpload Set extensions of resources that can be uploaded to the report server. Extensions for built-in file types like *.rdl and *.pbix are not required to be included. Default is “*, *.xml, *.xsd, *.xsl, *.png, *.gif, *.jpg, *.tif, *.jpeg, *.tiff, *.bmp, *.pdf, *.svg, *.rtf, *.txt, *.doc, *.docx, *.pps, *.ppt, *.pptx”.
SupportedHyperlinkSchemes Sets a comma-separated list of the URI schemes allowed to be defined on Hyperlink actions that are allowed to be rendered or “*” to enable all hyperlink schemes. For example, setting “http, https” would allow hyperlinks to “https://www. contoso.com”, but would remove hyperlinks to “mailto:bill@contoso.com” or “javascript:window.open(‘www.contoso.com’, ‘_blank’)”. Default is “*”.
August 2018 sees many new features added to the version of Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server. Here they are, broken out by area:
Out of the whole long list of new features, these features stand out as especially interesting. For more information, see our blog post.
Report theming is available in Power BI Report Server, which allows you to quickly color your entire report to match a theme or corporate branding. When you import a theme, all your charts automatically update to use the theme colors, and you can have access to the theme colors from the color palette. You can upload a theme file using the Import Theme option under the Switch Theme button.
A theme file is a JSON file that includes all the colors you want us to use in your report along with any default formatting you want to apply to visuals. Here is a simple sample JSON theme that just updates the default colors of the report:
{
"name": "waveform",
"dataColors": [ "#31B6FD", "#4584D3", "#5BD078", "#A5D028", "#F5C040", "#05E0DB", "#3153FD", "#4C45D3", "#5BD0B0", "#54D028", "#D0F540", "#057BE0" ],
"background":"#FFFFFF",
"foreground": "#F2F2F2",
"tableAccent":"#5BD078"
}
The ability to format a column by a different field in your model is one of the significant improvements to conditional formatting.
Another new conditional formatting type is the Format by field value. The Format by field value lets you use a measure or column that specifies a color, either through a hex code or name, and applies that color to the background or font color.
The report page tooltips feature is included in the August 2018 update of Power BI Report Server. This feature lets you design a report page to be used as a custom tooltip for other visuals in your report.
We’ve greatly improved log axis in your cartesian charts. You should now be able to select log scale for the numeric axis of any cartesian chart, including combo chart, when you have data that is completely positive or completely negative.
SAP HANA SSO Direct Query support with Kerberos is now available for Power BI Reports.
Note
This scenario is supported only when SAP HANA is treated as a relational data source with reports you’ve created in Power BI desktop. To enable this in Power BI Desktop, in the DirectQuery menu under Options, check the “Treat SAP HANA as a relational source” and click OK.
The API version shipped with this release is 1.13.0.
Now Power BI visuals can fall back to a previous version compatible with the current version of the server API (if available).
As an IT admin, you can now use your organization's MDM tool to remotely configure Power BI iOS mobile app access to a report server. See Configure Power BI iOS mobile app access to a report server remotely for details.
March 2018 sees many, many new features added to the version of Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server. Here they are, broken out by area:
Out of the whole long list of new features, these features stand out as especially interesting.
Create rules to conditionally color the background or font color of a column based on specific business logic in your table or matrix.
You want readers to have access to your report, but some of the pages aren't finished. Now you can hide them until they're ready. Or you can hide pages from normal navigation, and readers can get to the page by bookmarks or drillthrough.
Speaking of bookmarking, create bookmarks to tell a story with the data in your report.
Select multiple data points in multiple charts and have the cross-filtering apply to the entire page.
A slicer can apply to one, two, or more pages in a report.
Create new measures based on existing measures and numerical columns in a table.
When you drill down in a given category in one visual, you can have it filter all the visuals on the page by that same category.
When you export a paginated (RDL) report to PDF, you can now get an accessible/tagged PDF file. It's larger in size but easier for screen readers and other assistive technologies to read and navigate. You enable accessible PDF by setting the AccessiblePDF device information setting to True. See PDF Device Information Settings and Changing Device Information Settings.
Power BI reports in Power BI Report Server can connect to a variety of data sources. You can import data and schedule data refresh, or query it directly using DirectQuery or a live connection to SQL Server Analysis Services. See the list of data sources that support scheduled refresh and those that support DirectQuery in "Power BI report data sources in Power BI Report Server".
In Power BI Report Server, you can set up scheduled data refresh to keep data up-to-date in Power BI reports with an embedded model rather than a live connection or DirectQuery. With an embedded model, you import the data, so it's disconnected from the original data source. It needs to be updated to keep the data fresh, and scheduled refresh is the way to do that. Read more about "scheduled refresh for Power BI reports in Power BI Report Server".
You can open and edit Power BI report (.pbix) files from the server, but you get back the original file you uploaded. If the data has been refreshed by the server, the data won’t be refreshed when you first open the file. You need to manually refresh it locally to see the change.
You can upload files up to 2 GB in size, though by default this limit is set to 1 GB in the Report Server settings in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). These files are stored in the database just as they are for SharePoint, and no special configuration for the SQL Server catalog is required.
You can access shared datasets from Power BI Desktop with an OData feed. For more information, see Accessing shared datasets as OData feeds in Power BI Report Server.
This release supports scale-out. Use a load-balancer and set server affinity for the best experience. The scenario is not yet optimized for scale-out, so you see models potentially replicated across multiple nodes. The scenario will work without the Network Load Balancer and sticky sessions. However, you not only see an over-use of memory across nodes as the model is loaded N times, but performance will slow in between connections as the model is streamed as it hits a new node in between requests.
Administrators can set the following properties in SSMS Advanced Properties for the server farm:
Config file rsreportserver.config
<Configuration>
<Service>
<PollingInterval>10</PollingInterval>
<IsDataModelRefreshService>false</IsDataModelRefreshService>
<MaxQueueThreads>0</MaxQueueThreads>
</Service>
</Configuration>
The developer API (REST API) introduced for SSRS 2017 has been extended for Power BI Report Server to work with both Excel files and .pbix files. One potential use case is to programmatically download files from the server, refresh them, and then republish them. This is the only way to refresh Excel workbooks with PowerPivot models, for example.
There is a new separate API for large files, which will be updated in the Power BI Report Server version of Swagger.
Power BI Report Server now hosts SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) internally. This isn't specific to scheduled refresh. Hosting SSAS can greatly expand the report server memory footprint. The AS.ini configuration file is available on the server nodes, so if you're familiar with SSAS, you may want to update the settings, including maximum memory limit and disk caching etc. See Server properties in Analysis Services for details.
Excel and Power BI contain a portfolio of tools that is unique in the industry. Together, they enable business analysts to more easily gather, shape, analyze, and visually explore their data. In addition to viewing Power BI reports in the web portal, business users can now do the same with Excel workbooks in Power BI Report Server, giving them a single location to publish and view their self-service Microsoft BI content.
We’ve published a walkthrough of how to add Office Online Server (OOS) to your Power BI Report Server preview environment. Customers with a Volume Licensing account can download OOS from the Volume License Servicing Center at no cost and will have view-only functionality. Once configured, users can view and interact with Excel workbooks that:
Power BI Report Server now supports the new Power BI table and matrix visuals. For the latest version of Power BI Desktop, on the Power BI Report Server download page, select Advanced download options.
Check these sources to keep up-to-date on new features in Power BI Report Server.
More questions? Try asking the Power BI Community
Events
Power BI DataViz World Championships
Feb 14, 4 PM - Mar 31, 4 PM
With 4 chances to enter, you could win a conference package and make it to the LIVE Grand Finale in Las Vegas
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Learning path
Use advance techniques in canvas apps to perform custom updates and optimization - Training
Use advance techniques in canvas apps to perform custom updates and optimization
Certification
Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate - Certifications
Demonstrate methods and best practices that align with business and technical requirements for modeling, visualizing, and analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI.