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Power BI Service and Mobile January 2019 Feature Summary

Headshot of article author Nikhil Gaekwad

Senior Product Manager, Power BI
12 februari, 2019

January was a feature-filled month for the Power BI team! We kicked off this new year by announcing some of the highly requested features by our community and couldn’t have wished for a better start. We hope you’re just as excited for what’s to come for the rest of 2019! To recap, here’s a list of all the features we shipped last month:

Secure-embed for Power BI reports

We made it extremely easy for you to embed Power BI reports to internal sites within your organization. With the new Embed option found in the File menu for each report, you can securely embed the content within internal portals, whether it’s hosted on-premises or cloud, without needing any advanced coding skills. The best part is that reports embedded in this way respect all item permissions set in Power BI and data security through row-level security (RLS). The Embed option also supports basic URL Filters and URL settings, which allow you to build experiences into your portals using rudimentary HTML and JavaScript skills. Learn more


Dataflows January updates

In November of last year, we announced the public preview of Power BI dataflows. The reception we received was overwhelming and we were pleased to see so many early adopters leveraging this within their organization. Based on your feedback, we continued to update the dataflows editor in January with three new capabilities:

  1. Data connectors – We added UI support for new connectors such as MySQL, Teradata, Azure Data Explorer, and improved many more. Check out the full list here.
  2. Native SQL queries– We added support to run native SQL database queries within Power BI – saving you a ton of time if you are already using them elsewhere.
  3. Power Query Online transformation support – We also added support for all transformations in the Power Query Online engine, which is particularly useful if you are already using Power BI Desktop.

Learn more for how to get started with Power BI dataflows for self-service data prep.

Personal bookmarks

We brought the power of bookmarking to report consumers in the service. With the release of personal bookmarks, we added the ability for end users to create their own set of bookmarks for the reports they have access to. Personal bookmarks allow users to capture various states of a report page (including filters, slicers, and state of visuals), give them friendly names, and later return to each state with just one click. In addition, users can also mark any bookmark as their default, so their favor bookmark gets applied each time they open the report. Check it out if you haven’t already or learn more.


Custom visuals monetization

Customer visuals are core to building effective and intuitive storytelling in Power BI. The community of developers has grown substantially since it’s launch in 2015 with hundreds of visuals available for download. In January, we announced the option for developers to monetize on the custom visuals they have built with in-app purchases. A visual with additional purchases is similar to any other in-app purchase add-ins (IAP) in the AppSource marked with a price tag of ‘Additional purchase may be required.’ IAP custom visuals can be downloaded for free by any user, however advanced features can be purchased for a cost. Learn more

On-premises data gateway management

To help you gain visibility and manage all the on-premises data gateways within your organization, we launched a public preview of the Data Gateway management feature in the Power Platform admin portal. Learn more


Power BI Report Server January update

We continued to make enhancements and shipped a new update for the Power BI Report Server in January. The update includes many highly anticipated features such as copy and pasting between pbix files, expand & collapse on matrix row header, and row-level security support. Try it out for yourself by downloading the latest update and check out the blog to learn more all the new capabilities with this release.

E-mail subscriptions time-based scheduling

To help users stay on top of their data, we further amplified the e-mail subscriptions feature in Power BI by introducing time-based scheduling for reports and dashboards. With this update, users can now setup a subscription to run daily, weekly, or if you’d prefer, only on certain days of the week. This new capability is available on all Power BI dashboards and reports, in both Pro and Premium subscriptions. Learn more


Report enhancements for mobile

For Power BI mobile apps, we further enhanced the report consumption experience by adding the following new capabilities:

  • Filter is available for landscape reports
  • Modern visual header support in mobile reports
  • Portrait report layout in tablets (iOS and Android)
  • Support for report query string

Download the Power BI mobile app on your device to try these out today or check out the What’s new page to learn more.

Presentation mode in Power BI Windows app

To help you leverage Power BI dashboard and reports when presenting, collaborating, and having day-to-day discussions at work, we added a new presentation mode capability in the Windows 10 app. Now, all you need to do is tap the full screen button in the menu bar of the app and this will take you into a view where you only have your visuals and data. Learn more

Release notes and BCDR FAQ

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:

Lastly, we also added a BCDR FAQ document to help understand how high availability & disaster recovery works in Power BI.

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