Changes in the September 2023 update to Power BI Desktop

This page has 0 threads | Add post

Blogs

Finding our blogs useful? Please consider helping us to share more!

Changes in the September 2023 update to Power BI Desktop
The biggest change in this month's update is that you can now edit mobile reports interactively, but it's the new DAX brackets colours we're most excited about! 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 25 September 2023

In this blog

New DAX colouring for parentheses
You can now design mobile reports interactively
Editing relationships is now officially released
You can now define linguistic relationships for Q&A visuals

Unless you like designing reports in mobile view this is a month of modest improvements: so modest that I've listed them below on the same page (normally I'd write a separate blog on each).

New DAX colouring for parentheses

I would have called them brackets, but the other Andrew Owl always tells me off when I do this ...

Unclosed brackets show up in red, and Power BI shows round and square brackets in different colours - the colouring convention is similar to the one used for Excel formulae.

We haven't seen any announcement about this change, but it's definitely just been introduced. I'm still trying to work out the rule for which brackets have which colours!

You can now design mobile reports interactively

Suppose I start with this table:

A table designed by someone who shouldn't be designing tables.

I can then format this in mobile report view:

The same report added to a mobile view, with additional interactive formatting applied.

I can now maintain two different versions of this report, and edit each independently. However, I still think this feature is pointless! Either you have two completely different versions of the same report (one for mobile, the other for tablet/desktop), or you have one version which just scales down when you view it on a mobile phone.

Editing relationships is now officially released

The feature to make changes to relationships in Model view is now officially live:

However, I blogged about this when it was first turned on in preview by default back in February, and I don't think much has changed since. Most users will already be familiar with this feature.

You can now define linguistic relationships for Q&A visuals

When adding a Q&A visual, you've been able to define synonyms for some time:

You can click on this icon to define rules about your data (such as that purchases and transactions are synonyms, for example).

However you can now define linguistic relationships (the misspeling of "fore" is Microsoft's, not mine)!

Some of the relationships created for our Create-a-Creature database by default.

An example given in this month's update blog is definning what the word best means in different contexts (highest sales? smallest average cost?), which presumably I could add to the existing relationships were I to have the energy to learn the rules to do so!

This looks to me like Microsoft trying to find a solution for the Copilot AI tool that they are trying to incorporate within all their software (but then I confess that I've never been a fan of the Q&A visual ...).

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

This blog has 0 threads

Add a new post