Since Power BI launched, we have been listening carefully across different avenues of feedback to what you, our users, need to have added to the product. Our Ideas site has been the main place for you to leave suggestions. In July 2020 we migrated to a new platform using Dynamics 365 and Power Portals, and we heard from you about issues with the new site.

Shipped improvements

Over the past year, we addressed many of those issues and have recently made a larger update to fix some major problems as follows:

• The ‘Hot ideas’ option on the main page now shows ideas that have had the most votes in the last month.
• Improved the voting flow so it takes you directly to sign in if you are not signed in.
• Improved the interface so you can see more prominently that you have voted on an idea.
• Addressed issues with voting on mobile, where sign-in didn’t work, and the voting buttons were unresponsive.
• Also, links from social media now take you straight to the idea itself.
• Fixed issues with deep linking. When you sign in from an idea page, you’ll be taken back to that same page.
• Fixed an issue with search by persisting the search term when you go back to the home page from the search results page.
• Improved the search suggestions dropdown list to show total number of votes for the idea.
• Fixed an issue where it was required for users to provide consent when accessing the site for the first time or tenant administrators to approve it for the entire organization.
• Improved the performance of the site so it loads quickly.

Improvements planned for the future

There are more improvements in the pipeline we are actively working on to make your experience better:

• Ability to sort search results based on votes, feedback and status of ideas so you are able to easily find the idea.
• Improve idea submission by enabling you to paste images inline when you submit an idea.Ability to get notifications when we update the status of ideas that you have submitted or voted on.
• When the product team merges ideas together, you want to see on the remaining idea the list of duplicate ideas which were merged.
• You asked to be able to edit your ideas and comments after you have posted them.

We will include these changes in the monthly feature blog posts here as they ship.

Using Microsoft Accounts to log into the Ideas site

More broadly, we heard feedback from you about the requirement for a work Microsoft account (sometimes called an ‘org account’) to be able to submit an idea or vote on them on the site. We did this so we can align the community forums and ideas with the Power BI product to use the same identities everywhere. We understand that some of you do not exclusively use your work account and prefer to use your personal account to enable you keep links to ideas and comments as you switch jobs, and we are looking into possibilities to make this easier for you.

Status updates

When ideas first get submitted, they are given a ‘New’ status. Items move to ‘Needs Votes’ and once someone in the product team has reviewed the item, we mark it as ‘In Review’. We review items in a few ways:

• We do feature planning cycles on a 6-month basis, during which we dig into the ideas to see what our users are asking for, and what we can fit into the schedule based on other work.
• We’ll commit to updating the status of the top 25 ideas at most every 3 months, hopefully more often. Even if the update is just “we’re still considering this, it hasn’t been prioritized yet but please keep voting”, we want to make sure the ideas don’t stagnate.
• As we get started on features, we search through comments etc. to see exactly what you are asking for on that particular feature.

Features are marked as Planned when they go into the Release Notes (e.g. at Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 2 plan overview), meaning we have a clear idea of the work involved and when it’ll be delivered.

‘Completed’ means your idea has made it into the product and has shipped!

Clean-up efforts

As well as establishing this process, we have been making a concerted effort to de-duplicate the 25000+ ideas that were on the forum! We have enlisted the help of some of our top community members and MVPs and already de-duplicated hundreds of ideas over the last few months. We’ll keep working on this but we’d appreciate your help too – if you find duplicate ideas, or ideas that we’ve shipped and need their status updating, please report them on this form.

Team transparency

The last thing that is changing in this process is that comments and status updates from the product team will have our real names shown against them rather than just “Administrator”. Everyone on our team cares really deeply about feedback from our users, whether it is from the Ideas forum, other social media, or person-to-person feedback, and we want to make sure it’s clear that your ideas are heard and make a difference to what we have planned for the future.

Finally – if you have any other suggestions or feedback about the Ideas forum, you can fill out this form. Thank you all for helping us make Power BI work for you!