Power BI Desktop updates for November 2024

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Power BI Desktop updates for November 2024
This month sees a few new preview features (of which we've chosen to highlight list and text slicers), but only two release changes: paths in Azure maps, and the ability to create new measures in DAX queries. 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 06 December 2024

In this blog

Paths in Azure maps
Creating Measures in DAX Queries
List and Text Slicers (Preview Features)

In a light month for updates we've chosen to highlight one preview feature (as well as the only two release changes that we could see, which we'll start with below).

Paths in Azure maps

I'm going to hold up my hands and admit defeat with this one, as reproducing flight paths (which seems to be the main motivation behind this change) will be no small undertaking. Here's the sort of visual that this change will allow you to create:

This example is taken from the Microsoft November 2024 update blog.

The basic principle behind this feature is that when you have a set of observations of the location of something (like a plane) you can use a timestamp field to distinguish between them, and get Power BI to connect these location points with a path.

Creating Measures in DAX Queries

You can now create measures from within DAX queries:

This fourth button is becoming more and more useful in Power BI Dekstop.

For example, you might want to create a measure summing price * quantity across sale transactions:

Here we're adding a measure to the Sales table.

This creates this initial template for a new measure:

// Write your formula below, select 'Run' to try it out. When ready, select 'Update model' to add the measure to your model.

DEFINE

MEASURE 'Sales'[New Measure] = COUNTROWS('Sales')

You can then edit this to create your chosen measure, run it and update your model:

After you've run your DAX query successfully you'll need to click on the button shown to update your semantic model with your new measure (you'll be asked whether you really want to do this).

List and Text Slicers (Preview Features)

Because it's a thin month for changes, I thought I'd show a couple of things introduced in preview mode: text and list slicers (I think list slicers predate this update, but hey ho):

You can turn on the new list and text slicers as shown in Power BI options.

Here's where these new slicers can be found:

The icons look virtually identical! The icons are (from left to right) tile slicer, text slicer and list slicer.

For a text slicer, the idea is that you can type in any text:

You can choose what films you want to display, for example.

You can then filter by this chosen text:

Here we're displaying all films whose titles contain Potter and.

The list slicer allows you to create a slicer like this:

A list slicer looks ... familiar!

Just for the sake of completeness, here's a tile slicer:

Here we're showing all films belonging to the chosen two categories.

What you'll see from the above is that these new slicers aren't really new at all: they're just repackaging existing slicer functionality into an easier-to-use format.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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