The main announcement in the Power BI community this week was the October 2020 update. The new update is all about visuals and updates to existing visuals. Let’s take a closer look at some of the new features this month.

Canvas watermarks

Microsoft has always focused on UX design, trying to make Power BI as user-friendly as possible. In the October update there are now on-canvas watermarks to help new users quickly learn. The watermarks show how to get data, populate the fields pane, and start using visuals.

If users don’t have their own data to load yet, they can try a sample dataset from the canvas watermark. This is a really helpful feature, as oftentimes, first-timers have little idea what a proper dataset should even look like. With the watermark sample dataset tutorial, one can start building visuals within the first 10 minutes of using Power BI.

Personalized visuals in October update

Earlier this year, Microsoft showed a new personalize visuals feature. The feature allows users to customize and tweak visuals as they want in the reading view. Starting this month, the feature is now generally available and includes:

• Drag and drop fields within the same visual property,
• First-time coach marks to help new users,
• “Don’t summarize” option removes the default aggregation option, showing the raw values in a column,
• Enable/disable setting at page-level. This allows to turn on or off the feature at the page level.

Automatic table detection from Excel and JSON

The final cool feature I’d like to highlight is the table detection from Excel files. Remember you had to go back to Excel and format data as tables before loading it into Power BI? Otherwise, you had to do a lot of transformations in Power Query to prepare data for further analysis.

From now on, the Excel connector will automatically identify sections of each spreadsheet and extract them into a table, showing them under suggested tables in the navigator.

The new feature also flattens JSON files into a table. Before you had to flatten lists manually.

With all these new updates taking place, Microsoft is staking its claim as one of the clear leaders in the big data and analytics field.

During the Ignite conference in late September, Microsoft rolled out several new features for Power BI. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key features announced during Microsoft’s tech conference.

Power BI Premium 

The Power BI Premium subscription will be soon available on a per-user basis. Right now, Premium is only available for $5,000 USD per month. This model worked for large companies, which may have saved on individual licenses for each of their users. However, for smaller companies the premium option was a pretty stiff price to pay.

Another pain point is that the Power BI Professional license doesn’t give users access to some key AI capabilities.

This will change now, as companies will be able to upgrade their existing professional licenses to Premium. Although Microsoft didn’t reveal the exact price, the company said it will be “uniquely affordable and highly competitive in the industry.”

Natural Language Capabilities 

Earlier this year, during the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS), Microsoft announced Smart Narratives. The Smart Narratives is an augmented analytics feature that provides data summarizations in reports.

The feature gives descriptions of data and can automatically update when a report is filtered or drilled down. When used together with the Q&A natural language feature, Power BI users will start getting into the advanced augmented analytics field. Please read our previous article on Smart Narratives for further details.

Another amazing feature is Anomaly Detection. This isn’t available yet, but once launched the feature will help to find sudden changes and outliers in a data set. After discovering anomaly, the feature will be able to provide an automatically generated explanation of the data anomaly.

With this tool, an analyst can double check herself for potential mistakes in the data or if there aren’t mistakes, but true anomalies, then see an explanation behind the outlier.

New Look for Power Query 

The good old Power Query is also getting a new look. A new visual interface will appear, Diagram View, instead of the classic data grid view. In the Diagram View queries will appear together in a flowchart representation. It’s probably hard to imagine right now how the new Power Query will look and feel, but the author is excited about this feature.

According to Microsoft, the visual data preparation will be available “within the next calendar year.” Despite the new look, Power Query will still work on the M language, so the core features aren’t probably changing that much; just a better overall user-friendly interface.

Integration with Teams 

Power BI will get a new add-in application for Microsoft Teams. The integration will include the ability to browse reports and dashboards, and directly embed them into a Teams chat. This way absolutely everyone in the team can explore the same data.

In addition to the linking option, users can also browse Power BI datasets. Users will be able to open a Power BI report in Teams and collaborate on reports right there instead of switching  between Teams and Power BI.

“A critical part of creating a data culture is ensuring data is available when and where decisions are made,” said Kim Manis, a program manager at the Power BI Desktop team. “It’s going to be great seeing organizations have data one click away.”

Of course, it will take some time before users learn how to take advantage of all new Power BI features. But once the community digests and masters the new features, Power BI will take big steps forward toward better user interface, ease of use and new AI capabilities.

The leading Ukrainian oil company, Ukrnafta, improved work processes and efficiency by deploying Power BI and Office 365 cloud services.

The company launched Microsoft services among its more than 40 oil and gas production and refining units across Ukraine. This benefited to more than 3,000 employees.

Before the deployment, the company’s 10 main oil and gas units, as well as about 30 supporting facilities worked separately from each other. Each of these units had their own accounting systems, different unit catalogs, IT and other services. All of this meant there was a lot of extra manual work. The company felt this pain when trying to consolidate the enterprise-wide processes and reporting.

Ukrnafta’s digital transformation with Office 365

To fix this, five years ago, Ukrnafta decided to pursue digital transformation. They partnered with SoftwareOne to consolidate the infrastructure and deploy Office 365 across the company, said Vladimir Krasotin, Director of IT at Ukrnafta.

Upon deployment, the next step was to teach everyone to use the new tools. The company’s project team planned a series of online staff training using the Teams software. After learning to communicate via Teams, the employees later learned SharePoint, OneDrive and Power BI, among other tools.

According to Krasotin, the implementation of Office 365 was especially helpful during the COVID-19 lockdown, as some of the company’s staff was working remotely.

“Employees from different departments told and demonstrated specific examples of how Teams, SharePoint, and Power BI technologies help them in their work,” Krasotin said.

The digital transformation has proved successful. Right now, Ukrnafta’s employees are actively using Office 365 tools. Close to 90% of employees use Teams daily, and in general, 95% of employees use Office 365 services daily.

With 24 drilling rigs and 537 filling stations, Ukrnafta controls more than 60 percent of the oil and gas market in Ukraine. The company’s network includes ten main oil and gas production units and up to 30 support units.

Better user experience (UX), AI and embedded analytics will be the three pillars of the Power BI platform development in the future.

During Microsoft’s Inspire conference last month, Arun Ulagaratchagan outlined the Power BI development strategy. Arun is Corporate Vice President of the Business Intelligence Platform at Microsoft.

Going forward, Power BI developers will focus on the following three focal points. First, Power BI will get better UX. Second, developers plan to introduce more AI. And third, Power BI will embed easier with other Microsoft tools.

Having said that, the plan is to make Power BI UX even more functional and visually pleasing. Generally, the goal is to make Power BI as easy to use and visually similar to Excel and PowerPoint.

“This is the beating heart of Power BI, the ability to get beautiful insights that are very simple for the end user to consume,” Arun said.

Power BI’s move toward AI

Power BI has already done significant improvements to its AI features this year. For example, in May, Microsoft added the smart narratives feature. To learn more, please read our article on benefits of reporting using the smart narratives feature.

After that Microsoft introduced AI features in Power Query. These features give users more opportunities to improve data preparation with machine learning.

Finally, Microsoft will improve Power BI’s embedding options. Developers want to improve Power BI’s ability to blend with Azure Synapse Analytics, Excel and other Office 365 tools.

In conclusion, the ultimate goal is to help companies develop a proper data-driven culture and embrace analytics. Amid the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies are struggling to stay afloat. In these challenging times, the use of business intelligence tools can help businesses survive.

“That’s how we think about a data culture,” Arun said.

Arun summed up: “Helping customers create a data culture is about helping everyone in the organizations make better decisions with data. It’s about everyone, and all the decisions they make, the ability to harness all of the data and translate that into insight to drive your business forward.”

The Community Summit and Extreme365 Europe took place last week.

The summit brought together the Microsoft Business Applications community. Experts from the Microsoft community shared their knowledge and best practice with participants.

Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the event was held virtually. The attendees missed out on networking opportunities and delicious Catalan food under the Mediterranean sun. However, when it came to learning, the online format was probably more effective. One could attend many sessions scheduled one after another without having to leave a room.

Power BI in summit

We were tuning into Power BI-themed sessions and they were value-packed.

With things getting tough in the economy, in many industries the use of BI tools is the difference between success and failure. And Microsoft Power BI is definitely one of these tools.

Some said that Power BI is simply a visualization tool, something that “draws beautiful graphs better than Excel”. The truth is Power BI is so much more than that.

It is a “whole business intelligence tool”, said Ana-Maria Bisbe, a BI consultant from Madrid, during her presentation.

Anna-Maria went through the different stages of a BI project development. She showed how to extract data from different sources, explore, and transform data using the powerful M language. After that, she showcased the best practices in data modeling and building the business logic using DAX.

The speaker showed how to apply embedded AI capabilities in Power BI. Machine Learning integrated functions in Power BI can help solve a variety of complex business problems. This saves users’ time by providing automatic report summaries, showing accurate forecast, and even customer sentiments from reviews.

The sessions at the Community Summit are showing that modern self-service BI is made for everyone. This is no longer the realm of IT specialists. Various business users, including finance staff, operations managers, and executives are using modern BI tools to solve their business questions.

Modern BI has made it possible for business users to control their data and build interactive visualizations. Users can also uncover insights and improve storytelling to cater to the needs of their customers better than ever.

In our last week article, we looked at Power BI’s new upcoming visual, smart narratives, which will be a big help for management reporting.

However, it was not only the smart narratives visual that caught our attention; with the latest Power BI platform upgrade, Microsoft has taken big steps toward promoting and helping companies to develop data-driven culture.

During the last week Business Applications Summit (MBAS), Microsoft demonstrated that it is working to create its own eco-system, in which different Microsoft tools will be effectively working together to create a full data experience for all users.

Indeed, the development of data-driven culture within companies was the major theme at MBAS. A special interest was given to the development of AI and augmented intelligence capabilities within the Power BI platform.

Power BI as leading self-service BI tool

The idea is to promote the use of BI within enterprises by integrating its analytics features into other Microsoft tools, such as Excel, Teams and other Office products. In this scenario, Power BI and its improved embedded intelligence capabilities may serve as a wrap that helps to tie everything together. Considering the already existing popularity of Power BI and its growing community, Microsoft is taking the right steps.

“All of these announcements are important steps that Microsoft is taking to further cement themselves as leaders in this space… They’re further empowering all users to effectively bring data to their jobs on their terms,” TechTarget cited Mike Leone, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

Embedded BI, which is the integration of self-service BI tools into other Microsoft business applications, enhances user experience by providing beautiful visualizations, real-time analytics and interactive reporting. With Power BI, business users enjoy the ability to access and analyze data in one place without having to open other tools. Embedded BI reduces the time spent switching between different applications and analytics tools, providing more insights and increasing a workflow.

Besides the smart narratives visual, other significant Power BI updates include new enterprise semantic modeling capabilities, including shared and certified data sets, which can be a big help for users when building reports; the PowerPoint for Data feature, which provides pre-built templates for report layouts just like when building slides in PowerPoint; and the ability to connect to Power BI data straight from Excel.

With all these new updates taking place, Microsoft is staking its claim as one of the clear leaders in the big data and analytics field.

Businesses around the world are adapting to the remote work environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft came up with a new Power BI dashboard that helps companies gain insights on the productivity of their remote workers.

The Business Continuity Dashboard for Power BI uses Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics solution to track and analyze employee behavior. The dashboard can show insights, such as a percent of employees who are still connecting with their colleagues. It also shows whether supervisors are connecting one-on-one with their team members and how often they’re doing that. Lastly, the dashboard tracks which teams experience difficulties maintaining external collaboration.

Knowing the level of granularity Power BI can offer, companies can use a lot of valuable information about their teams.

How the dashboard is working

To start using the dashboard, users need to connect two pre-built queries, Hourly Collaboration and Business Continuity, to a new Business Continuity template. After using the two pre-built queries to populate a company’s dashboard, it is possible to customize the queries. Users can make it more fitting to their organization’s needs and requirements.

One needs the latest version of Power BI and have analyst privileges for Workplace Analytics to set up the dashboard. As all Power BI dashboards, results are refreshed every week.

Microsoft built the Business Continuity dashboard not for the general workforce, but possibly for HR executives and business leaders. The dashboard highlights in which parts of an organization the new working conditions disrupted efficiency or having the largest impact. This can help business leaders to come up with numbers and actual figures. This is much better than “he said, she said” type of arguments. The dashboard helps business processes to support and develop better ways of working.

To find about more about the dashboard and read a step-by-step installation process, please follow this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-analytics/tutorials/power-bi-bc

The spread of COVID-19 is changing ways we look at technology in our lives. At the same time, technology is helping us cope and track the new virus in new ways. Microsoft and Esri have launched real-time online dashboards to track all confirmed and suspected cases of COVID-19. The dashboards also track a number of deaths and recovered patients.

The websites put on real-time news on the spread of the Covid-19, including situation reports and maps of infected areas. Data is taken directly from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During the age of excessive information and short memory span, dashboards have proved to be effective tools to show key metrics and data in real-time. Dashboards can also help to quickly make sense of data and turn large volumes of information into actionable insights.

With the coronavirus tracking dashboards, people can find information on the spread of the virus in one place and constantly updated. Users can select their country, see all the numbers and compare them with data from other countries.

The WHO first reported about the coronavirus on December 31, 2019 after Chinese authorities reported about the virus. The new coronavirus is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome. Although the majority of cases result in mild symptoms, some may cause severe pneumonia and organ failure leading to death.

Since the pandemic, the industry has seen a surge in demand for real-time data. Merging a bunch of Excel files to make a once in a quarter report is no longer an option. Successful companies are moving from the rear-view to the front view. They try to predict future events as accurately as possible. Looking back to yesterday doesn’t cut it anymore.

Things, such as alerts, real-time data refreshers and forecasts are becoming an important part of a company’s toolbox. Just look at how bad organizations had it when supply-chains were interrupted in the early stages of the pandemic.