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Microsoft Power BI blog

Power BI Weekly Service Update

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

Microsoft
szeptember 8, 2015

In this week’s update we’ve added two new industry sample dashboards, reports and datasets as well as two new capabilities:  Friendly strings for hyperlinks and the initial version of Drill.

See what you can do with Power BI with two new Industry Related Samples

You have likely have seen and used the Retail Analysis Sample in the past, and we’re releasing two additional samples. The IT Spend Analysis industry sample dashboard and underlying report analyzes an IT departments planned vs. actual costs. You will be able to investigate where huge areas of deviations from the plan occurred. Here’s a screenshot of that dashboard:

The Supplier Quality Analysis industry sample concentrates on one of the most common supply chain challenges – supplier quality analysis. By exploring this sample, you can determine the best and worst suppliers and identify which plants are able to minimize downtime. Here’s a screenshot of that dashboard:

We’ll be adding a few more industry samples in the coming weeks so stay tuned to the blog!

Friendly Hyperlinks

There are times where you want to provide users with a link from a report to a specific location outside of Power BI. With today’s deployment we’ve added the ability to create a hyperlink on any text within a Text Box.  I start by adding a text box and typing the text I’d like my users to read.  Then, I select the text I’d like to add a hyperlink to. I then click the hyperlink icon and paste the URL I’d like the user to navigate to when they click on it. I’ve added a link to our Financial Sample support article on the “Hyperlinks” text.

Now, when the user is in Reading Mode they can click on the text and a new tab will be opened with the specified URL. Now, you can provide links for your users without needing to display the entire URL.

Drill Support in Power BI Reports

Now for the big announcement:  Drill!  With today’s update you can now create a Drill path that enables users to navigate from one level of data to related data that the report author has defined. I’ll be using the Financial Sample throughout so download it and follow along.  The excel workbook has some really great data that shows how effective the new Drill capability is in Power BI.  Here’s a quick screenshot of the excel workbook and data:

There are a number of fields that I’d like to have my report viewers be able to Drill up and down as they interact with the data.  The first ones are Product and Segment.  I’d like my users to be able to see the profit for a given product and then be able to drill down into related Segments for a specific product.  To accomplish this you simply need to drag both Product and Segment into the Axis list.  Remember, the order is important here. This defines the hierarchy of the drill.  I also added Profit as the value so that I can show how much Profit I’m making for each Product and Segment.

Normally, clicking on the Paseo column would filter this visual, and any others on this sheet, to only display data related to Paseo.  To enable Drill, and change the behavior of click, simply select the arrow icon in the upper right hand corner of the visual.  You’ll see the arrow change color to show it’s enabled. Once you click on this, you can now drill down into the Segments and the associated Profit for only the Paseo product.  Here’s what that looks like:

And, as you’ve guessed, you click on the arrow in the upper left corner to navigate back up to the initial Product view.  

Finally, you’ll also see an icon with two down-arrows in the top left corner when you’re not at the bottom of the drill path:

When you click on this icon you will drill down to the next level but with all values displayed (Profit for all Products by Segment).

You can add more fields to the Axis if you have an even deeper Drill path that you’d like to create.  I’ve added Discount Band to this visual and drilled down through  Paseo and then Government.

Of course, all the normal capabilities of reports work with Drill.  I’ve created a richer report that provides me information about not only my profit as described above but also the number of Units Sold by Year and then Month (creating a Hierarchy with Year and Month) and then Profit and Discounts by Country. Here’s what the report looks like with the Low Discount Band selected and with the Units Sold by Year drilled down the Month:

And that’s the first view of Drill in Power BI.  As I noted above, this is the initial release for Drill and we’re looking for feedback on additional capabilities such as drill to details, drill-through etc. as well as on the user experience we have today.  Make sure to add your feedback to https://support.microsoft.com!