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Power BI Service and Mobile October and November 2019 feature summary

Headshot of article author Nikhil Gaekwad

Senior Product Manager, Power BI
5 december, 2019

The past couple of months have been nothing short of fantastic for the Power BI team. Even with the holiday season fast approaching, our engineers continued to work hard and deliver some of most anticipated features across Power BI service and mobile. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap all the announcements we made in the months of October and November:

Refresh your Power BI dataset using Power Automate

We released a new Refresh a dataset action to the Power BI connector for Power Automate. You can now trigger refreshes for your datasets in Power BI based on hundreds of Automate triggers. Whether your trigger is based on changes to items in your SharePoint list or updates to an Excel file in OneDrive or SharePoint Online or a complex day and time schedule, there are dozens of use cases where you can leverage this action. Check out the announcement blog to learn more.

On-premises data gateway management via PowerShell (Preview)

We rolled a public preview of PowerShell cmdlets that help you automate and manage tasks for Power BI data sources and On-premises gateways. These cmdlets are available in the PowerShell Gallery and can be installed in an elevated PowerShell session. Learn more

Contact lists for reports and dashboards

To help end users ask questions, raise issues with the data they see, or seek confirmation, we added a new feature that allows authors to configure the list of contacts, which can include multiple users and groups, for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service. When used with the New Look for the Power BI service, end users can quickly find and contact someone to make timely data driven decisions. Learn more

Power BI lineage view (Preview)

Understanding the flow of data from the data source to its destination is critical for building reports. To help you visualize this, we introduced a public preview of lineage view. The view encompasses the flow of all Power BI workspace artifacts including dataflows, datasets, reports, and dashboards and their connections to the external data sources. Check our announcement blog to learn more.

General availability of Automated Machine Learning

We announced that Automated Machine Learning (Auto ML) in Power BI is generally available in all public cloud regions. With this feature, business analysts without a strong background in machine learning can build ML models to solve business problems that once required data scientists. Most of the data science behind the creation of the ML models is automated by Power BI, while giving visibility into the process used to create your ML model to provide you with full insight. To learn more, check out the step-by-step tutorial that shows how to build your machine learning model using Auto ML or refer to the documentation.

Large models in Power BI Premium (Preview)

We supercharged Power BI Premium by releasing a public preview of large models. As you are already aware, Power BI datasets can store data in a highly compressed, in-memory cache for blazing fast query performance. This enables fast user interactivity over large datasets. However, these dataset caches were limited to 10 GB after compression. The new large models remove this limitation, so dataset cache sizes are limited only by the Power BI Premium capacity size. Check out https://aka.ms/LargeModels for further information such as availability by region, and how to set up your Power BI Premium capacity for large models.

Data protection capabilities (Preview)

As enterprises grow their Power BI deployments, reducing the risk for data leakage becomes critical. To help organizations govern their sensitive business data, we partnered with the Microsoft Information Protection and Cloud App Security team to release a public preview of data protection capabilities for Power BI. With this feature, you can now classify and label sensitive Power BI data using the familiar Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels used in Office, enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF, and much more. These are also applicable to Power BI mobile apps. Read our detailed documentation to learn more.

Embedding paginated reports in applications (Preview)

We also announced the public preview of embedding paginated reports to allow ISVs and developers to embed pixel-perfect reports in their own applications using Power BI APIs. Check out the tutorial or read the documentation to learn more.

Upgrade classic workspaces to the new workspaces experience

We announced that you can now opt-in to upgrading classic workspaces to the new workspaces experience in Power BI. The Power BI new workspace experience has been General Available since April 2019. It offers improved security management, more flexible workspace roles, and new capabilities like a contact list to help you support your teams. Using the new workspace experience also enables several major features like shared and certified datasets and large models, to name a few. Learn more

November update for On-premises data gateway

We also updated the Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of November. Version 3000.14.39 includes a new way to change the gateway’s recovery password and an updated engine to match the Power BI Desktop November update. Learn more about the updates in our release blog or check it out by installing the new gateway.

Updates to Power BI mobile apps

Lastly, we updated the Power BI mobile apps with the following features:

  • Android support for remote configuration of Report Server access settings – IT admins can now use their organization’s MDM tool to remotely configure those settings on both iOS and Android devices. See Configure Power BI mobile app access to Report Server remotely for details.
  • Cross-report drill through – You can now tap on a data point to drill through to access other reports and report pages. When you drill through to a target page, the content in that page is filtered based on the drill through settings.

Roadmap updates

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: