Last month we put out the call for submissions using free public datasets — along with other topics that interest you — for the Data Stories Gallery, and we got some fantastic entries! Congratulations to the grand winner and runners-up. The inspiration topic for this month is: mapping! We want to see your best reports that involve maps and geographic data.
We have an exciting release of the Power BI Desktop this month. It includes several formatting features that have been top asks and new Quick Calcs for your measures. We also have several updates to data connectors and two new query editing options.
We have a very special new member to the custom visuals gallery: the Dual KPI. Dual KPI efficiently visualizes two measures over time. It shows their trend based on a joint timeline, while absolute values may use different scales. The reason this visualization is special is because we use it at Microsoft in executive dashboards to monitor usage and user satisfaction for each product, or when an executive wants to keep an eye on two KPIs at the same time (for example Profit and Market share or Sales and Profit).
We’ve heard from customers that SharePoint Online is a critical part of their company’s data communication and dissemination strategy and that to-date it wasn’t easy to include Power BI content there. The feature we’re announcing today changes all that.
With Power BI mobile apps on iPhone and iPad, you can view and interact with all of your pre-defined reports and dashboards while on the go. But what about answering questions that are not pinned to your dashboards? Or questions that you didn’t prepare for? With this release, we are happy to add a preview of Q&A capabilities to our Power BI iOS app. With a unique chat-like experience that’s tailor-made for natural language, you can ask questions of your data and receive answers in the form of charts and graphs directly on your mobile device.
