What's new in the February 2024 Power BI update?

This page has 0 threads | Add post

Blogs

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

What's new in the February 2024 Power BI update?
The only big change in the February 2024 update to Power BI Desktop is that "Power BI Home in Desktop" is now enabled by default, but the exciting new visual calculations feature is also now waiting in preview. 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 04 March 2024

In this blog

Visual Calculations
Power BI Home

The February 2024 update is (like so many recent ones) most notable for the new features announced in preview:

As well as providing more updates for On-object interactions, the February 2024 update has added the new Visual calculations feature to preview.

Visual Calculations

These are in preview, but have the potential to change the working life of report creators. The idea is to let people create ad hoc calculations without needing to learn about the complexities of filter context in DAX:

This function would give the running total of the field in question, and is far easier to write than it would have been without the new visual calculations feature.

Visual calculations are a big change to Power BI, and introduce a whole range of new concepts and new DAX functions. My colleague Andrew has written a separate full blog showing how to create and use visual calculations in Power BI.

Power BI Home

This is now enabled by default, although technically it's still a preview feature:

The screen for creating new reports and opening existing ones.

This is really annoying and disappointing. Not only does it not conform to other Microsoft standards for forms for creating, opening, saving and closing files, but it's also really hard to change your file location when saving a file:

When you're saving a file this seems to be the only link to change the folder path. It's easy to see here because I've put a red box round it and made the screen shot smaller, but otherwise it's just a tiny icon lost at the bottom of your screen!

As a postscript: we've just finished updating all of our Power BI Desktop courseware to include on-object interaction, so we really hope that Microsoft release this preview feature soon!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

This blog has 0 threads

Add a new post