Today we are happy to announce our January update of Power BI Report Server! This release has many highly anticipated features such as copy and pasting between pbix files, expand & collapse on matrix row header, and row-level security support. Read on to learn more about these and many other new capabilities we’ve added in this release.
- Dot plot layout support in scatter charts
- Copy value and selection from table & matrix
- Built-in report theme options
- Search in filter cards
- Expand & collapse matrix row headers
- Copy & paste between Desktop files
- Smart guides for aligning objects on a page
- Set tab order for objects on a page
- Tooltips for button visuals
- Report accessibility improvements
- DAX editor improvements
- Modeling accessibility improvements
- New DAX functions
- Optional DrilldownFilter argument for the RollupAddIsSubtotal function
- NonVisual function
- IsInScope function
- Updated Power BI Desktop for Report Server icon
- Transport layer security settings
- High contrast support for all panes and report footer
- Improved keyboard shortcuts dialog
Report Server
Row-level security
This release includes support for one of the most highly requested features for Power BI Report Server – support for Row-level security in Power BI reports. The feature works in a similar fashion to how it does in the Power BI service. Report authors can set up roles in Power BI Desktop and assign users or groups to those roles in the Power BI Report Server portal once they’ve published the report. Unlike the Power BI service, however, users may not view content in a report until they have been assigned a role in Power BI Report Server. We encourage you to read the supporting documentation to learn more about the feature in Power BI Report Server.
Reporting
Dot plot layout in scatter charts
We have a substantial update to our scatter chart in this release. You can now use categorical fields on the x-axis of your scatter chart, allowing you to create dot plots.
You don’t need to do anything special to enable this feature. Just add your categorical field to the x-axis and remove anything you may have in the Details bucket.
You can this in combination with all of our formatting features, and of course it works with drilling on the x-axis.
Let us know what you think and if there is anything you’d like to see added to this new visual layout!
Copy value and selection from table & matrix
We’ve heard from many of you that you need to copy data out of Power BI into other applications like Dynamics CRM, Excel, and even other Power BI reports. Our first feature related to this is the ability to copy a specific value or a selection of data from a table or matrix. You’ll be able to find both of these options on the right-click menu.
Copy value will add the unformatted value to your clipboard, and from there you can paste it wherever you want. For example, copy value from this cell in my table will add 32130 to my clipboard.
Copy selection on the other hand will add a tabular version of all data currently selected in your table or matrix to the clipboard, including the row and column headers. The data will retain the data formatting that has been applied and subtotals are excluded. This option is very useful if you want to reuse a selection of data in another report in Excel for some quick calculations.
For example, if I have the entire Economy column selected in my matrix and pick Copy selection…
… I’ll get all this data in a tabular format when pasting into Excel.
Note that when you have multiple measures in your matrix, they are always selected together, so you’ll always get both when copying selection. For example, copying the below selection…
… Will add the following to your clipboard.
Built-in report theme options
In summer 2018, the Power BI Desktop team had several great interns who worked on some exciting features. The first of these intern projects to ship in the Power BI Desktop is a themes gallery in the Desktop that lets you pick between several built-in report themes.
You’ll be able to see these new theme options under the Switch Theme button in the Home ribbon tab. In addition to the default theme, you can now pick between 7 new options.
All you need to do is pick the theme of your choice and it will automatically apply its color palette to all your visuals using the default color palette. There is now also a quick link the theme gallery on our community site if you want to try out a theme built by our great community!
This project was done by our intern Chelsie Eiden, thank you Chelsie for your great work!
Search in filter cards
We’ve had search in our slicers since our June 2016 update, and now with this update, we’ve added it into our basic filter cards as well. This functionality is much loved and used in our slicers, and we think this is a welcomed update to our filters as well.
Expand & collapse matrix row headers
We are very excited to announce the release of one of the most requested visual features, the ability to expand and collapse individual row headers.
There are two ways you can expand row headers. The first is through the right-click menu. You’ll see options to expand the specific row header you clicked on, the entire level or everything down to the very last level of the hierarchy. You have similar options for collapsing row headers as well.
You can also add +/- buttons to the row headers through the formatting pane under the row headers card. By default, the icons will match the formatting of the row header, but you can customize the icons’ color and size separately if you want.
Once the icons are turned on, they work similarly to the icons from PivotTables in Excel.
The expansion state of the matrix will save with your report. Conditional formatting will only apply to the inner most visible level of the hierarchy. Note that this expand/collapse experience is not currently supported when connecting to AS servers older than 2016 or MD servers.
Copy & paste between Desktop files
Another frequent request we’re delivering is the ability to copy visuals between .pbix files. With this release, you can now copy a visual either through the visual’s context menu or through the standard Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut and paste it into another report through Ctrl+V.
This is very useful for anyone who builds and updates multiple reports frequently. When copying between files, formatting that has been explicitly set in the formatting pane will carry forward, and anything that is relying on a theme or the default settings will update to match the theme of the destination report.
If the fields in your model are different, you’ll see an error on the visual and a warning on the fields that don’t exist, similar to the experience you see if you delete a field in the model a visual is using. All you’ll need to do is replace the broken fields with the ones you want to use from the new model. If you are using a custom visual, you’ll also need to import it to the destination file as well.
Smart guides for aligning objects on a page
You’ll now 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’ll see the smart guides any time you drag or resize something on your page. When you move an object near another one, it will snap into a position aligned with the other object.
If you decide you don’t want the smart guides, you can turn them off in the Report settings page of the Options dialog.
This feature started life as a project by one of our summer interns, Kishor Subedi. Thanks for helping, Kishor!
Set tab order for objects on a page
The default tab order for objects on a page is the creation order. However, you may have a specific order in mind for users to consume your report. If this is the case, you can now set your own custom tab order for the report page. To set the tab order, you can open the selection pane and switch the from the default Layer order to the Tab order.
You can drag and drop the fields to reorder the tab order.
Things that are currently hidden are also dimmed in this view, since things that are hidden are automatically skipped.
You can also mark something that should be skipped in the tab order by hovering over the number and clicking the “Skip” icon. Once you mark something to be skipped, it will never be in the tab order, even if it is visible on the report. If you have a lot of shapes on your report for purely decorative reasons, it might be a good idea to skip them.
Tooltips for button visuals
If you’ve used the button visuals to add navigation or information to your report, you might have wanted to customize the tooltip for the button. Some of our fans on twitter certainly did:
https://twitter.com/ExceleratorBI/status/1053368067969843200
We love hearing feedback and when there are small changes like this our developers often jump at the chance to make an impact and improve the product for our users. To that end, you can now look in the Action card of any button visual and you’ll see a Tooltip option. This lets you put in text that’ll be used in place of the ‘CTRL + click here to follow link’ tooltip you see by default.
Report accessibility improvements
The Power BI team is dedicated in making sure data is accessible to everyone, and as part of that, we are invested in improving the user experience for those who are using assistive technology. This release, as part of that larger effort, we added keyboard and screen reader support for our formatting and analytics pane. If your focus is in the formatting pane or analytics pane, you’ll be able to tab and shift+tab between all the controls, hear useful information read out by a screen reader for any given control, and change the settings using arrow keys and space/enter depending on the control type.
Just like any other accessibility improvement, this update improves the experience for all users as well. I expect many of our power users will find the keyboard navigation will allow them to work a bit faster when making many changes to a visual’s formatting all at once.
This release also has improvements for our field well. Our field well can now be navigated using just a keyboard and interacts well with screen readers. To help improve the usability of editing charts with screen reader and keyboard, we have also added new options to the context menu of fields to move fields up and down within a well or move to other wells.
The selection pane is also now fully accessible. This includes keyboard navigation, screen reader support and high contrast support. When using the selection pane with a keyboard, once you open the selection pane from the ribbon, your focus will move directly to the pane. From there you can tab through all the buttons on pane. When your focus is on the list, you can press F6 to “activate” the list and use up/down arrows to cycle through the list of visuals. While your focus is on an individual object in the selection pane list, you can use the following hotkeys:
- Select/deselect an object – ENTER or SPACEBAR
- Multi-select – CTRL+SPACE
- Move an object up in the layering – CTRL+SHIFT+F
- Move an object down in the layering – CTRL+SHIFT+B
- Hide/show (toggle) an object – CTRL+SHIFT+S
Press tab to exit the activated list and return to the top of the pane.
Our fields list pane is now 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.
The following keyboard shortcuts can be used in the fields list:
- Move focus along the pane – Tab
- Select a field – ENTER/SPACE
- Collapse all tables – ALT+SHIFT+1
- Expand all tables – ALT+SHIFT+9
- Collapse a single table – Left arrow key
- Expand a single table – Right arrow key
- Open a context menu – SHIFT+F10 or context key
We’ve also added new options to the context menu to add the field to the report page, to the different filter buckets, and the drillthrough bucket. With these updates, all the panes are now fully accessible.
The following experiences also fully support keyboard navigation, screen readers, and high contrast settings:
- Getting started dialog
- File Menu & about dialog
- Warning bar
- File Restore dialog
- Frowns dialog
Lastly, we are also enabling you to more quickly navigate to different areas of Power BI Desktop through ctrl+F6. Instead of just jumping between visuals on a page and the page tab switcher, you can also quickly jump to whatever panes are currently visible, the view switcher on the left and the account options on the top right. You can still reach the ribbon through pressing Alt.
Modeling
DAX editor improvements
We’ve enhanced our DAX editor to make it much more powerful!
First, the new editor has new keyboard shortcuts, line numbers, and indent lines. The experience will be very similar to what you have for other Microsoft editors, such as VS Code.
Some of the less well-known keyboard shortcuts you might find useful are:
| Alt+ ↑ / ↓ | Move line up/down |
| Shift+Alt + ↓ / ↑ | Copy line up/down |
| Ctrl+Enter | Insert line below |
| Ctrl+Shift+Enter | Insert line above |
| Ctrl+Shift+\ | Jump to matching bracket |
| Ctrl+] / [ | Indent/outdent line |
| Alt+Click | Insert cursor |
| Ctrl+I | Select current line |
| Ctrl+Shift+L | Select all occurrences of current selection |
| Ctrl+F2 | Select all occurrences of current word |
Our second update is that you can now zoom on the formula bar, using either ctrl +/- keys or the ctrl + mouse wheel. This is great if the font size is too small or you need to present the DAX to a large group.
The last update is that you can now use a much larger view of the DAX formula bar. When expanding the DAX editor, the formula bar new takes up almost the full height of the Power BI Desktop, instead of the static 11 lines that was used previously.
Modeling accessibility improvements
Our modeling experiences also has accessibility improvements this release. We’ve added keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and high contrast setting support to the following experiences:
- Manage relationships dialog
- Edit relationships dialog
- Manage roles dialog for RLS
The data view is also now fully accessible. You can navigate around areas of the data view using Ctrl+F6. The data grid region also supports table style navigation – arrow keys to move around, PgUp/PgDn support, Home/End and Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End support. You can also trigger the context and filter menus with the keyboard. The data view also supports screen readers and high contrast settings.
New DAX functions
We have three DAX functions in this release. In support of our new expand/collapse feature for the matrix visual, there’s now an additional optional DrilldownFilter argument for the RollupAddIsSubtotal function and a new NonVisual function. Additionally, we’ve added the IsInScope function, which is a better way to detect hierarchy level in a measure expression. Some popular tasks you might need this for include (1) calculating child percentage of parent subtotal and (2) calculating ranks of children under different parents. You can find more information on these formulas here: ISINSCOPE, NONVISUAL, New argument for ROLLUPADDISSUBTOTAL.
Analytics
Color saturation on visuals upgraded to use conditional formatting
For quite a while now, we’ve had two different ways to dynamically color a visual’s data points depending on the visual type. Our charts had a color saturation option in the field well that gave you basic controls, and the table and matrix visuals had conditional formatting. We’ve added a ton of functionality to the conditional formatting experience for table and matrix over the last year, but the color saturation feature for cartesian charts hasn’t received much love.
That has finally changed, as we’ve upgraded all the generally available visuals that previously used color saturation to have the same conditional formatting experience as table and matrix currently have. This means you’ll have access to all three types of formatting currently available: Color by color scales, Color by rules, and Color by field. As mentioned, this change impacts all visuals which previously had color saturation which includes:
- All variants of column and bar charts
- Funnel chart
- Bubble & filled maps
- Treemap
- Scatter chart
With this upgrade, you’ll notice the color saturation bucket is no longer in the field well. Instead to format, you’ll go to the Data colors card in the formatting pane. Here you can format with the color pickers as normal or select the Advanced controls option to launch the conditional formatting dialog.
Once there, you can use any of the three conditional formatting options and select OK to apply the formatting.
And that’s it! The conditional formatting colors will apply on top of whatever formatting you already have through theming and manually picking through the color pickers.
Other
Updated Power BI Desktop for Report Server icon
We’ve had feedback from users who’re using both the PBI RS and Service versions of Desktop that it’s hard to tell which version they’re using. To help this we’ve changed the PBI RS version’s icon to a yellow-on-black logo:
You’ll see this in shortcuts and in Task Manager etc. If you already have the icon pinned to your taskbar you’ll need to un-pin and re-pin to update it to the new icon.
Transport-layer security options
Security is a priority for Microsoft, and we have company-wide programs in place to ensure customers have control over the security of communications with Microsoft services. IT and network security admins may want to force usage of more recent versions of TLS (transport layer security) for any secured communication on their network, and Power BI Desktop now respects the Windows registry keys you use to manage this. For example, you can disable client applications from using the older TLS 1.0 by setting the following in the Windows registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\TLS 1.0\Client] “Enabled”=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\TLS 1.0\Client] “DisabledByDefault”=dword:00000001
Power BI Desktop will respect the registry keys specified on those pages, and only create connections using the right version of TLS. There’s more information on the Windows TLS documentation sites here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/tls/tls-registry-settings
High contrast support for all panes and report footer
All the panes in Power BI Desktop, the page switcher, and their contents are now compatible with high contrast modes.
Improved keyboard shortcuts dialog
For quite some time, you could press Shift+? to open a dialog listing several of the most used keyboard shortcuts for Power BI reports. Given all the accessibility work we’ve done recently in Power BI desktop, we decided it was time for this dialog to be revamped. You’ll now see a completely new shortcut dialog with much more helpful information in it.
You can also see the full list of shortcuts at the end of our Accessibility Doc.
That’s all for this release! We hope that you enjoy these updates and please don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments below.