We’re almost halfway through the year and what a great start it’s been to 2019! The Power BI team continued to deliver some of the most anticipated features in the month of May. We were also heads down planning for the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, where we look forward to connecting with many of you there next week! In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown of what we announced in last month:
- Report commenting
- Custom navigation for Power BI Apps
- Governing Power BI visuals within organizations
- Enhanced e-mail attachment support for paginated reports
- May update for on-premises data gateway
- Updates to the Power BI mobile apps
- Roadmap updates
Report commenting
We kicked off May by announcing commenting for Power BI reports. Gone are the days of taking screenshots and starting conversations about your data over e-mail. With report commenting, you can directly add comments to report pages or specific visuals without switching context. Power BI will also automatically capture your report view, so others reading the comment can view the report exactly as you did when writing the comment. In addition, you can also @mention other individuals within your organization to grab their attention. The @mentioned users will receive an email and a push notification on their Power BI mobile app. Try it yourself – start a conversation on your favorite report or check out the blog post for more information.
Custom navigation for Power BI Apps
We super charged Power BI apps by giving reporting teams the ability to customize navigation for end users, so they can find content quickly and understand the relationships between different reports and dashboards. In addition, we also added the ability for app owners to configure the app name, set a theme color, choose a new icon, and even adding a support URL to a new or existing app. Apps will never look the same again – check it out or read the documentation to create one yourself.
Governing Power BI visuals within organizations
We provided an in-depth guidance on how administrators can govern custom visuals within their organization. This is a must-know if you are an admin in Power BI. Learn more
Enhanced e-mail attachment support for paginated reports
We enhanced the e-mail subscriptions feature for paginated reports in Power BI. In addition to PDF, you can choose the following new attachment types: PPTX, XLSX, DOCX, CSV, or XML to be part of your subscription(s). We have also raised the attachment file size limit to 25 MB for paginated reports for large data exports. Learn more
May update for on-premises data gateway
We also released an updated version of Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of May. The latest version (3000.5.185) includes a preview of Gateway Performance Monitoring, Amazon Redshift Refresh, and an updated mashup engine. Try it out for yourself by installing the new gateway or learn more about the new capabilities here.
Updates to the Power BI mobile apps
There were multiple updates that went out in May for the mobile apps in various platforms. Here’s a quick summary:
- Key Influencers visual: We added support for the key influencers visual on mobile so you perform analysis of key drivers over your data with just a few taps.
- Maximize the view with full screen mode (Android and iOS): We added a new button to let you control when to focus on your data by removing report headers and footers and giving you maximum space for viewing your reports.
Roadmap updates
Lastly, we use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months. These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently:
- Report performance metrics – added to release notes
- Managed distribution – added to release notes
- New refresh scenarios – added to release notes
- Insights – Key influencers – release date updated to September 2019