Power BI Desktop Updates for July and August 2024

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Power BI Desktop Updates for July and August 2024
Most of the changes in the July and August updates to Power BI are either too insignificant to merit a write-up here or else are for features in preview. For most report-writers the ability to document DAX measures is the only change which will make much difference in these two updates. We've been creating our idiosyncratic monthly blogs on Power BI updates since November 2016, and also deliver online and classroom Power BI courses.

Power BI Desktop Updates for July and August 2024

Most of the changes in the July and August updates to Power BI are either too insignificant to merit a write-up here or else are for features in preview. For most report-writers the ability to document DAX measures is the only change which will make much difference in these two updates.

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 05 September 2024

In this blog

Documenting DAX Measures
Exporting to PowerPoint
What's Still in Preview?

As is often the case in the summer months there weren't many changes in the July and August updates to Power BI. In this blog we review the only two likely to impact most report creators (the ability to document DAX measures and simplifications to the PowerPoint export feature), and have a quick peek at what's still waiting in preview.

Documenting DAX Measures

Let's suppose that we've created two measures in a semantic model (or a Power BI report, as we humans like to say):

The two measures we've added to this report.

You now want to document these. Previously you would have had to use a third-party add-in like DAX Studio or Tabular Editor, but now you can do this in the DAX query pane:

The new(ish) DAX query view pane.

To document measures like this simply right-click on the Data pane and choose to define all of the measures in your model:

Right-click in the Data pane and choose to define all of the measures you've created.

You should now get generated DAX listing out your measures - you could now run this to document your measures and show their current value for all of the data in your model:

You can see the (fairly meaningless) value of your 2 measures for your entire model, but more importantly see a record of what the measures are doing.

You can of course add your own measures for the purposes of calculation, although these measures won't be added into your model. For example we could create an ad hoc measure called Proportion of East Anglia and then show its value:

DEFINE

MEASURE 'All measures'[Proportion of East Anglia] = DIVIDE(

// first get total quantity sold

SUM(Sales[Quantity]),

// divide this by quantity sold for East Anglia

CALCULATE(

SUM(Sales[Quantity]),

Region[RegionName] = "East Anglia"

)

EVALUATE

SUMMARIZECOLUMNS(

"East Anglian proportion",

'All measures'[Proportion of East Anglia]

)

However just to stresss: this measure won't be permanently created in your semantic model.

Exporting to PowerPoint

The dialog box for doing this in Power BI Service has been simplified:

The option to export a report to PowerPoint.

Here's the new combined dialog box:

Apparently this combines the two previous dialog boxes, although I confess that I don't remember these!

What's Still in Preview?

A lot, including on-object interaction, sadly:

The features still in preview in Power BI.

Note that the ticks above may not be the default ones as I have a habit of turning on some preview features in my version of Power BI Desktop and disabling others. In particular on-object interaction is not enabled by default in any clean iniitial installation of Power BI Desktop.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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