Posts from: December 2016

Power BI Desktop – 2016 Year in Review

2016 has been quite the year for the Power BI Desktop. Over the course of our 11 releases this year, we’ve released over 190 features and improvements based on the feedback that you’ve given us throughout the year. For December, we are taking a break from our monthly releases to focus on quality and we’ll be back early in the new year with a brand-new Desktop release. So instead of our typical monthly blog post, we’re looking back at the past year, recapping several of our favorite features, and taking a look at our big focus areas from this past year.

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Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays from the Power BI team, and our colleagues at PowerApps and Microsoft Flow! Thank you for all your support in 2016, and we hope you and your family enjoy this most wonderful time of the year.

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LiveTiles presents: the new Power BI Tile

LiveTiles is pleased to announce full integration with Power BI, allowing customers for the first time to visualize their data and other business content on a single pane of glass. The Power BI Tile will change the way you manage your analytics, by giving you the added advantage of being able to create meaningful dashboards that also can surface contextual documentation, reports, rich media, and social feeds alongside highly visualized data sets.

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Visual Awesomeness Unlocked: Pyramid 3D Chart by Collabion

Like the name suggests, a pyramid chart has a triangular structure. Lines run across it, dividing it into sections with thicknesses proportional to their values. A pyramid chart represents data in the form of percentages, with the whole chart representing 100%. A pyramid 3D chart built with Collabion helps you visualize the total data, as well as the hierarchical structure of it, in the form of a pyramid-like structure. A filtered pyramid chart, on the other hand, is represented in the form of a graduated glass pyramid filled by liquid, where the graduations indicate the values of different sections after data filtration. See more on this recent addition to the Custom Visual Gallery!

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5 most popular questions from the Power BI Ask Microsoft Anything event

A couple of weeks ago, the Power BI Team held its first Ask Microsoft Anything event, and it was a fantastic success! We received several pages of questions on the AMA community forum, and for over an hour a mixed group of Power BI Program Managers, Marketing Managers, and Developers answered them all. If you missed this event, we’ve collected the five most popular questions and answers below. Don’t see your question? Keep an eye out for the next AMA event and get your answer live!

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Power BI mobile apps feature summary – December 2016

Just before 2016 wraps up, we’re happy to introduce the latest update for Power BI mobile apps! Within this update, you’ll find new capabilities such as the ability to share an annotated report, and geo filtering for reports on Android devices. You will also find improvements to existing features, such as visuals links, Apple watch integration and offline background refresh adjustment to reduce cellular data consumption. It’s been a great year for Power BI Mobile, and we would like to thank you for providing valuable feedback and encourage you to keep posting in Power BI Community. We look forward to bringing you even more excellent new and improved features in 2017!

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Combining Excel Files hosted on a SharePoint folder with Power BI

Have you ever wanted to consolidate, combine or append data from multiple excel spreadsheets or workbooks? I bet you have, and it has been a painful process either done manually or via 3rd party add-ins. In this blog post, we’ll show you how, with the newest version of the Power BI Desktop and Power Query for Excel, you can combine multiple data from Excel files into one big tall table. This post was contributed by Miguel Escobar and Ken Puls, Power BI experts and authors of the new ebook, “[M]agic Tricks for Data Wizards”.

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Tech Tip Thursday: a look at the new Power BI Embedded Sample

Microsoft’s Guy in a Cube has been providing tips and tricks for Power BI and Business Intelligence on his YouTube channel since 2014. On Thursdays we highlight a different helpful video from his collection. This week, he takes a look at the new Power BI Embedded Sample that’s designed to show you what the API code should look like from a JavaScript perspective. The new sample includes code examples and comments to give you a feel for embedding Power BI reports into your own application.

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Milliman chooses Power BI Embedded for their Integrate application

Today, we’re excited to share how Milliman, a global market-leader in actuarial-products and services, has integrated Power BI Embedded into its solutions. Saptarshi Mukherjee, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Microsoft Power BI, met up with Paul Maher, Principal and Chief Technology Officer of the Life Technology Solutions Practice at Milliman, to welcome him and talk more about their solutions.

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Announcing the Sales Management Solution Template for Dynamics 365 with Data Export

Back in May, we announced the sales management solution template that simplified and accelerated building powerful and compelling Power BI solutions on Dynamics CRM (now Dynamics 365). The sales management solution template offered a very fast guided experience to create compelling reports on an extensible, scalable, and secure architecture that could be customized however one needed. This meant that instead of spending one’s time on plumbing, one could instead spend it on extending and customizing the solution template to meet your organization’s needs. Today, I’m pleased to announce the integration of Dynamics CRM Data Export with the sales management solution template for Dynamics 365.

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