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.
The Microsoft Treasury group manages $158 billion in assets, including cash and investments, account receivable, equity, and other investments. They act as an in-house bank for operations in over 190 countries, monitor thousands of bank accounts, and provide just-in-time cash management on a global basis. With a purview this large, Microsoft Treasury relies on vast amount of data in order to make fast, accurate, and actionable decisions to keep their operations running smoothly.
In the past, Treasury used a combination of Excel, PowerPoint, and third-party services to analyze and present their data, but Corporate VP, Treasurer George Zinn saw the future in the integration of a different product: Microsoft Power BI.
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.