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Changes in the June 2022 Update of Power BI
This month sees a smattering of new features, including nicer-looking tables, a new data hub and story-telling in PowerPoint. We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Posted by Andy Brown on 20 June 2022

In this blog

Enhanced table design
The new Data Hub
PowerPoint Storytelling
Goals have been relaunched as "Metrics"
Features currently in preview

Changes in the June 2022 Update of Power BI

This month sees the introduction of a handful of small changes (so small that I've covered them in this single blog, rather than devoting a page to each).

Probably the most important changes is that the new Format pane is now live, but since it's been turned on by default for months you're unlikely to notice this!

Enhanced table design

The stalwart table visual in Power BI now has a few improvements:

Microsoft have made it much more obvious when a row is selected, including showing a vertical bar to the left of the selected row.

There are a few subtle changes in appearance to make tables better to work with, and a range of new short-cut keys you can use to browse within tables.

The new Data Hub

If you're basing a report on a published Power BI dataset, you can now choose this from the Data hub dropdown:

Datamarts - still in preview - allow you to create yet another layer of data, in this case a fully managed Azure SQL database.

When you're using Power BI Service, you can easily click on a dataset to see the reports that reference it:

If you click on a dataset like this, you can see all manner of statistics about its use.

Here's what you'd get if you click on the dataset above:

You can see the reports using the dataset, and also (not shown in this diagram) a button allowing you to share it.

You can also click on the menu dots next to any dataset to create a new report based upon it:

This option would create a new report based on this dataset.

The push behind these changes is to reduce the number of datasets in use within a company, thus cutting down on wasteful data duplication within an organsisation.

PowerPoint Storytelling

When viewing a report in Power BI Service you can now choose to embed its data in a PowerPoint presentation:

The PowerPoint presentation will be updated with the latest data as you refresh the report.

You can then choose whether to create a new presentation or embed your report in an existing one:

Although this says it's a preview feature, it's available by default in Power BI Service.

You can now (within PowerPoint) choose to trust this Power BI add-in:

You'll need to trust this add-in to proceed.

You now have a Power BI report embedded in a PowerPoint presentation:

I would guess that we will see more integration like this between Microsoft Office and Power BI in the coming months!

Goals have been relaunched as "Metrics"

You can now create metrics in Power BI Service:

As before you can create scorecards, but these now consist of "metrics" rather than "goals", and are much more flexible.

I will do a full blog on how scorecards and metrics work when (if?) the feature finally emerges from Power BI Desktop preview. Speaking of which ...

Features currently in preview

The following features are in preview at the moment in Power BI Desktop (you can enable them if you want by choosing File -> Options and Settings -> Options from the menu):

History suggests that once a feature languishes in the top half of this list for a few months, it faces a lifetime in purgatory. The newer features at the bottom are more likely to see the light of day.

Maybe the September update will see a flurry of releases of pent-up changes?

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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Changes in the June 2022 Update of Power BI

Enhanced table design

The new Data Hub

PowerPoint Storytelling

Goals have been relaunched as "Metrics"

Features currently in preview

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