Welcome to the February 2025 update! Welcome to our latest blog post, where we are thrilled to introduce some game-changing features for Power BI that will significantly enhance your data analysis experience. First up is the improved modeling performance for live editing of semantic models in Direct Lake mode within Power BI Desktop. This results in at least a 50% improvement in each modeling change.
Read moreUnderstanding how users adopt and use Azure Active Directory features is critical for IT admins. It allows you to plan your IT infrastructure and communication to increase usage and to get the most out of AAD features. The usage and activity reports in the Azure admin portal is a great starting point. However, many of you have shared feedback with us that you want the ability to further analyze your data to understand how you can gather richer insights into what’s going on with their Azure Active Directory for the various capabilities that you heavily rely on. So, today we are excited to announce the new Power BI Content Pack for Azure Active Directory.
» Read moreComparing 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.
» Read moreAre 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.
» Read moreDo you use DirectQuery to connect directly to your data with Power BI Desktop? If so, we’d like to hear from you!
» Read moreThe 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.
» Read moreToday, 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.
» Read moreIt has been a few months since we released the new developer tools and custom visuals APIs, and we are working to add more APIs to help you develop the best custom visuals possible. On that note, we are excited to announce that version 1.4 was just released, introducing localization support, so now custom visuals are aware of the locale, and can localize the content of the visual accordingly. Read more about the new APIs available for custom visuals developers!
» Read moreToday we’re announcing the SAP Accounts Receivable solution template. The SAP Accounts Receivable solution template provides an end to end solution that contains AR data and reports sourced from your SAP system. This template includes four reports designed for a financial comptroller or other similar financial manager that needs to constantly be aware of their AR situation and provides powerful insights into accounts receivable by customer, document, and age.
» Read moreHave 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!
» Read moreEvery 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!
» Read more