Since March 2018, PowerBI Desktop has several new options for viewing and editing reports. First, there is an option to highlight one visual in relation to others, which is in its context menu. And then, there are a few more options that allow you to capture your favorite report views, view and manage objects in a report, lock objects, show field properties, and a set way to synchronize slicers…
Power BI users have long been able to, by entering a question in a specially specified field, create a report that, by combining the reporting dimensions and measures, answers the question asked. Recently this option has been enabled in the Power BI Desktop application. Home ribbon now, besides the usual „New Visual“ option, also contains „Ask a question“. Let’s see how it’s used!
PowerBI Desktop is an ever-evolving application. Although rarely, it may happen that it freezes, so you need to “kill” it by entering Task Manager, by pressing the CTRL + ALT + DEL key combination and exiting the active process. The novelty is that while working in the background, a document is being saved, so if a crash occurs, Power BI Desktop will offer you the option to restore the last version.
Power Query is an Excel add-in that is used to retrieve data from various sources, connecting to them and purging data before we use them to create a report. It manipulates data in a worksheet, managed within structured table, and allows directly adding them the model. First release of Power Query was an optional add-in for Excel. In version 2016 it has become an integral part of the application. This technology is embedded in PowerBI service.
In addition to options we use on daily basis Data model has some advanced options too. With them, we can define the perspective view on the table. Also, we can determine the behavior of columns when they are dragged in the Pivot Table, as well as to set additional attributes table that can be used when creating reports. Finally, it is possible to make one or more synonyms for each column, which later makes it easier to search the model.