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Changes introduced in the Power BI Desktop May 2023 update Part four of a five-part series of blogs
The big event this month is the (long-awaited) release of Azure Maps, but the May 2023 update also includes the official launch of the Optimize ribbon and allows you to use measures as data labels, among other changes. Changes in the May 2023 update of Power BI Desktop Azure Maps are finally released Using measures for data labels The Optimize ribbon has now been released into the world (this blog) Other changes in this month's update We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Changes introduced in the Power BI Desktop May 2023 update

Part four of a five-part series of blogs

The big event this month is the (long-awaited) release of Azure Maps, but the May 2023 update also includes the official launch of the Optimize ribbon and allows you to use measures as data labels, among other changes.

Changes in the May 2023 update of Power BI Desktop
Azure Maps are finally released
Using measures for data labels
The Optimize ribbon has now been released into the world (this blog)
Other changes in this month's update

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 09 June 2023

In this blog

Pausing and refreshing visuals
Optimization pre-sets
Performance analyzer
Apply all slicers button

The new Optimize ribbon is now live in Power BI

It's not often that Power BI Desktop gets a completely new ribbon!

The new Optimize ribbon should (if used judiciously) let you speed up report development.

The ribbon addresses 4 separate issues, which I'll explain under separate headings below.

Pausing and refreshing visuals

These leftmost two buttons do pretty much what you'd expect:

Here I've chosen to pause my visuals.

The idea is that you can concentrate on developing your reports, without having to worry about waiting for visuals' underlying queries to run:

Here I've created a column chart showing total quantity sold by town name, but it's not displaying any data because I've paused my visuals.

You can either click on the Refresh button for the visual to update the data just for this one visual, the Refresh button as shown in the ribbon to update all of your visuals or the Resume visual queries button to stop pausing visuals altogether.

This would be a good idea, but surely a better alternative is to use Query Editor to pick out just the top 10 rows from any query while building reports, then remove this constraint just before you publish them? You'll then be able to see the effect of changes that you make to visuals as you make them.

Optimization pre-sets

This allows you to choose between 3 different pre-sets:

You can click on the link shown to learn more - it will take you to this page.

Here's what the different options mean:

Pre-set	What it does
Query reduction	Turns off cross-filtering and adds an Apply button to the filter pane.
Interactivity	The default mode, allowing all real-time changes to slicers and filters.
Customize	Opens the Query reduction tab of the Power BI Desktop options dialog box, as shown below.

Here's what you see if you choose to customise your settings:

These options have been there for a while - they're just easier to get at now.

Full disclosure: on my Power BI Desktop choosing Query reduction chose the relevant options in the Query reduction settings, but didn't actually seem to make any difference! I think this may be down to my lack of understanding of (and interest in?) this feature.

Performance analyzer

The performance analyzer tool allows you to record how long it takes different visuals to refresh, so that you can identify any bottlenecks in your system: it's been in Power BI for some time.

Apply all slicers button

This just provides an alternative way to add a button to apply all of the slicers in your report, a feature introduced last month.

So although this is a new ribbon, it really only contains one genuinely new feature: the ability to pause and refresh visuals to speed up report development. The tools on the Optimize ribbon will be most useful to those using DirectQuery or very large datasets.

Parts of this blog
Changes in the May 2023 update of Power BI Desktop Azure Maps are finally released Using measures for data labels The Optimize ribbon has now been released into the world (this blog) Other changes in this month's update

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

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The new Optimize ribbon is now live in Power BI

Pausing and refreshing visuals

Optimization pre-sets

Performance analyzer

Apply all slicers button

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