Power BI – Q3 2024

Maarten François

R&D Lead

Power BI – Q3 2024

Version Updates

Almost every month Power BI is being updated. These updates introduce additional features to enhance your ability to integrate or analyze, while also addressing any issues such as bugs or security vulnerabilities. In this blog post, we will summarize the top features of the last 3 months (July/August/September). Similarly to the last quarter the amount of new stuff is quite limited.

General

Dark mode is now available in Power BI Desktop!

Reporting

1. Visual level format strings (PREVIEW)

Visual calculations are not part of your model. As such, it was not possible to format them (There are some workarounds with data labels or the new card/slicer visuals). With the addition of visual level format strings, you can now format visual calculations more easily.

It will now be possible to define the format of your measure/column at three levels and your visual calculation on two levels. At Model level, Visualization level and Element level. (Which is a specific element within your visual).

2. Subscriptions Updates

Subscriptions can now be sent to OneDrive and SharePoint. And it is now also possible to have to subscription ran on the last day of the month.

3. Data limit

To help alleviate performance issues on visuals with a lot of re cords it is now possible to add data limits in the filter menu of the visual/page/etc.

4. Legend update

Since it is possible to customize you series with more than just a different color(border colors, shapes, and line styles). This was not always reflected in your visuals legend. eg: Green color with a bold border. With this fix you now more accurately see you series in the legend.

5. Visual Calculations update

Aside from the previously mentioned visual level format strings, the data type of your visual calculation can also be customized in your visualization menu under format options.

Modelling

1. DAX Query View Updates

It is now possible to use the DAX Query View while being connected to a published semantic model. (when connected live). This means it is also possible to use the view while being connected to Direct Lake semantic model from Microsoft Fabric.
In DAX query view, you are now able to add or update multiple measures directly in the DAX Query View.

2. Metric Sets (PREVIEW)

Metrics set are now available in public preview. It is now possible to create and define metric sets that contain metrics, with the intent of re-use within an organization. The main goal would be to have better data quality where when someone for example talks about a Net Sales Metric that is always has the same definition if everyone uses the metric from a metric set.

Developers

1. BPIR updates