Posts categorised: Features

Power BI Service January Feature Summary

As you probably know, the Power BI service is updated weekly with fixes, updates, and new features. When we release major features in the service, we always to make sure to release a coinciding blog post, so you can stay up-to-date with the latest features in the service. Going forward, in addition to these posts for individual features, we’ll be posting monthly feature summaries for the Power BI service, similar to the posts you know and love for Power BI Desktop. So, without further ado, here’s the complete list of January updates in the Power BI service:

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Help Improve Power BI Desktop

Feedback from the Power BI community is extremely important in helping us to improve our product. Once a quarter, we conduct a survey to get insight into your level of satisfaction with Power BI and to get feedback on how to make the Desktop experience even better. This is a great opportunity to provide direct feedback to the product team. In addition, if you take the survey by 5pm PST on February 17th, you will also be entered for a chance to win a $50 AMEX giftcard.

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ZynBit Empowers Sales with Microsoft Power BI Embedded

Enrique Plaza Garcia, Product Marketing Manager of Microsoft Power BI Embedded, recently had a chance to catch up with Phil Dixon, CEO of ZynBit, to hear more about ZynBit’s innovative product and how they’ve incorporated Power BI Embedded into their offering to drive value to their customers and increase monetization opportunities for sales and marketing teams. Let’s take a look at how this successful start-up has leveraged Power BI Embedded.

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Actual Vs. Budget: Which visualization is most effective?

Comparing actual numbers against your goal or budget is one of the most common practices in data analysis. So which visual type would you choose to represent these numbers? Microsoft Design & Data Visualization Lead Miranda Li reviews some likely candidates, and talks about why some visuals work better than others for your audience.

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New blog series: Become your organization’s strategic advisor with Machine Learning and Power BI

Are you ready to put your organization on a path of continuous improvement using the most valuable decision support techniques? Check out Microsoft Senior Program Manager Christian Berg’s timely series of essays on how to become your organization’s strategic advisor using Machine Learning and Power BI, available on the Community Blog. Each post takes on a different aspect of business intelligence, and includes a how-to section to get you started creating customized solutions for your team. Most analysis in the posts is done using the R language, but Christian tries to keep any scripts generic enough that anyone can apply them to their own data even without prior hands-on R experience.

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Seven Steps for Using Data and Power BI to be Productive in Telling a Data Story

The Microsoft Office team recently partnered with Levo, a network for millennials in the workplace to help navigate their career paths, to poll 1,500 community members to find out more about their productivity habits and challenges. The Office team was looking for an engaging way to share Levo’s findings with the media – one approach they took was to use Microsoft Power BI to produce an interactive and compelling report from the data. This report is an example using data visualization to enhance storytelling efforts by leveraging the Power BI publish to web capability on blogs, websites and news articles. Power BI has also proved to be a great tool for telling stories in broadcast media – one example is the recent election coverage from KING 5 News. As I dug through the data, I got to thinking about my own productivity habits and how I work with data to tell a story.

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Introducing email subscriptions in Power BI: stay informed when it matters

Today, I am happy to announce public preview of email subscriptions for report pages. This new feature allows you to subscribe to emails of the report pages that matter most to you, with just a few clicks. Once you’re subscribed, Power BI will regularly send screenshots of that report page directly to your inbox. The image in your inbox will show up exactly as it does in Power BI, and include a link to the report where you can drill into any interesting findings. Thanks to email subscriptions, it’s never been so easy to stay up-to-date about the data that matter most.

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Power BI Community Blog Highlights

Have you visited the Power BI Community blog lately? Blog posts can be anything from opinion pieces on the latest industry trends, to helpful tips and how-tos for your fellow Power BI users, to even “trip reports” from your local User Group meeting or Microsoft event. Check out these great posts from October and learn how you can contribute your own posts!

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See how Microsoft Treasury uses Power BI with the US Consumer Personal Spending dashboard

Every day the members of Microsoft’s Treasury group have to make smart decisions about how to manage the company’s $158 billion in assets. Their guide to these decisions can be found in data and information analysis, and one of their tools of choice to manage this process is Microsoft Power BI. One amazing example of this data in action is the US Consumer Personal Spending dashboard, created by Investment Analyst, Carlton Gossett. This dashboard displays publicly available information in a dynamic, interactive way, allowing Treasury to quickly get a feel for consumer spending in the US and where our economy may be heading in the business cycle. Read more about how Microsoft Treasury uses this dashboard, and try it out for yourself!

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