Power BI new features in reporting in 2024, part 1

Co-founder and CEO at 10 Senses

Power BI is an ever-evolving tool that is upgraded on a regular basis. If you have been working with Power BI for at least a few months, you must have heard about the popular Power BI feature summaries released each month on the Microsoft Power BI blog.

In fact, it is highly useful to follow these updates as they equip you with new innovative solutions that can enhance your reporting and modeling experience with Power BI.

Last year, we started a series with a condensed overview of updates after each quarter. We have had a little break, but we are catching up now!

In this article, we will go through recent updates that occurred in Power BI reporting capabilities, but stay tuned for another piece that will also cover Power BI modeling and Service new features.

Let’s dive in!

Preview reporting features

Button slicer

At the end of last year, Microsoft added the button slicer to enhance the customization possibilities and user-friendliness. As a result, from now on, you can:

  • Customize the shape and appearance of your design with the corner radius,
  • Adjust the grid layout by:
    • dividing your design into rows and columns,
    • customizing card spacing,
    • using overflow styles (pagination or continuous scrolling with vertical and horizontal directions),
  • Use new alignment and format properties, or add images to your buttons,
  • Add interactivity by using different settings for different states (on hover, on press, or selected),
  • Add Select All and Force Selection toggle in the Single select option, or use the multi-select feature,
  • Add a tooltip to enrich your data visualizations.

New button slicer has a lot of customization options

The new feature is available by default, and you can add it by using Visual gallery on the ribbon, selecting Build a visual on the canvas, or using the on-object dialog box.

Reference Labels

Reference labels are another last-year addition that allows you to add custom labels to new cards.

As a result, you can provide relevant information, comparisons, key metrics, goals, and benchmarks in an appealing and concise manner.

Like the new button slicer, they come with a handful of useful options, such as:

  • Adding multiple data fields to your reference visuals,
  • Using custom content next to the three main components (title, value, and detail) to incorporate different data fields and measures to various styles,
  • Adding extra content in the Detail component section,
  • Using a divider with customizable lines and colors to differentiate callout and reference labels,
  • Incorporating a horizontal or vertical layout or different padding to your reference labels.

Enhance your Q&A visual with suggested synonyms from Copilot

Q&A visual is a powerful state-of-the-art feature that enables you to ask questions and get answers in the form of visuals.

It equips you with an intuitive way to explore data without extensive knowledge of data modeling. Although it doesn’t rely on generative AI, it takes advantage of multiple linguistic principles, associating words and phrases in your data model.

To increase the accuracy of answers, Microsoft has enhanced the Q&A setup tools to enable users to The new feature is available by default, and you can add it by using Visual gallery on the ribbon, selecting Build a visual on the canvas or using the on-object dialog box.

Reference Labels

Reference labels is another last year addition that allows you to add custom labels to new cards.

As a result, you can provide relevant information, comparisons, key metrics, goals, benchmarks in an appealing and concise manner.

Like the new button slicer, they come with a handful of useful options, such as:

  • Adding multiple data fields to your Reference visuals,
  • Using custom content next to three main components (title, value, and detail) to incorporate different data field and measure to various styles,
  • Adding extra content in the Detail component section,
  • Using divider with customizable line and color to differentiate callout and reference labels,
  • Incorporating horizontal or vertical layout or different padding to your reference labels.

Enhance your Q&A visual with suggested synonyms from Copilot

Q&A visual is a powerful state-of-the-art feature that enables you to ask questions and get answers in the form of visuals.

It equips you with an intuitive way to explore data without extensive knowledge of data modeling. Although it doesn’t rely on generative AI, it takes advantage of multiple linguistic principles, associating words and phrases in your data model.

To increase the accuracy of answers, Microsoft has enhanced the Q&A setup tools to enable users to add synonyms for column and table names in the model. As a result, report creators can specifically define how users may refer to their data by recognizing:

  • Approved synonyms coming from the names of fields or specifically added by the author (the association will be marked with a solid blue underline)
  • Suggestions (suggested terms), which are words and phrases that can come from multiple sources (Office thesaurus by default, but you can add your organization’s collections of approved terms). They will be used with lower priority and confidence than approved terms and marked with a dotted orange line.

Consequently, you can use synonyms to increase the quality of the Q&A visuals. Although the process of adding them may be time-consuming, Copilot Power BI facilitates the process by generating some for you. If you don’t have this feature enabled, you can turn it on in Preview features > Improve Q&A with Copilot.

On-object interaction updates

As usual, there have been a few enhancements to on-object interaction features, such as:

  • Always open in a new pane,
  • Resize the data flyout,
  • The add table button is back,
  • The new default setup includes (you can always customize which options you want to have turned on in the Options menu):
    • Moving build, a visual menu to the pane manager (it has been rebranded from Pane switcher recently) by default,
    • Showing both build and data panes expanded by default,
    • Format pane in the pane switcher by default,
    • Collapsing panes to the pane switcher instead of closing X by default.
  • Multi-select option in data flyout to add fields in bulk to your visuals (in one go). Microsoft has even managed to enhance this feature by adding container format support, which allows you to change the size, background color, or turn on titles in bulk,
  • Supporting gauge visualization.

On-object interaction is still in preview but is regularly updated

Visual calculations

Another interesting feature that has been added to the reporting kit is visual calculations.

These are DAX calculations that you can define and execute directly on visuals, which should streamline the process of creating DAX queries.

Such calculations can refer to any data in visuals, like columns, measures, or other visual calculations. You can use them to create common business measures, like running sums or moving averages.

Recently, Microsoft has even enhanced this feature by enabling the editing of visual calculations on the service. Therefore, you can add it by selecting New calculation or edit it by choosing Edit calculation from the context menu on a visual after publishing the report to the Service.

By default, this preview feature is toggled off, but you can turn it on in Options and settings in Preview features.

Dynamic subscriptions for Power BI reports

Microsoft has also recently enabled the possibility of dynamically subscribing to Power BI reports.

As a result, you are now empowered to distribute a personalized copy of a Power BI report to each recipient of an email subscription with predefined filters on a regular schedule or ad hoc basis.

Power BI Home Desktop is Enabled by Default 

Microsoft has also enabled a new preview of enhanced Power BI Home as the default experience.

It has been redesigned to equip you with a centralized and familiar location for all your Power BI activities within the desktop application. This enhancement will improve productivity and facilitate the exploration and consumption of content.

Just to remind you, when using Power BI Home, you don’t have to navigate through numerous menus or tabs to access your files and reports. It serves as an intuitive hub where you can manage your reports in one location, meaning:

  • Initiating a new report directly from the home screen,
  • Accessing reports from recommendations,
  • Locating the most recent reports in the Quick Access list.

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Mobile layout auto-create 

If you have ever created a mobile layout of your Power BI report, you must be aware of how much effort and time it takes. Luckily, Microsoft has recently added the possibility to generate a mobile-optimized layout with a click of a button.

As a result, from now on, when you switch to the mobile layout, you can quickly generate a mobile view by choosing the Auto-create button.

The auto-create engine understands the desktop layout and builds a mobile one, considering the position, size, type, and order of your visuals. What is more, it considers both visible and hidden visuals, so bookmarks changing the visibility of visuals should work automatically.

Nevertheless, you can still edit the automatically generated layout if the result is not in line with your expectations.

Power BI reporting updates

More styling options for column and bar charts

To better customize the formatting experience for column and bar charts, Microsoft added a few enhancements, such as:

  • Applying settings to All or Series to tailor formatting options specifically to categories or unique series,
  • Controlling transparency to achieve the perfect balance of visibility and design,
  • Customizing borders by choosing a specific color, matching the column’s fill, defining columns and borders’ width and transparency,
  • Renaming the Spacing card to Layout Card, relocating the Reverse order toggle, and introducing the Sort by Value,
  • Adding advanced ribbon settings to highlight a specific series or create visual continuity with an array of options (like matching series color, color selection, transparency, border color marching, border spacing, etc.).

All the above aim at equipping you with greater flexibility and creative freedom to present your data and insights in a clear manner.

Data bars in matrix subtotal/total conditional formatting

Microsoft has also updated the data bars for Matrix and Table to apply them to:

  • Values only: displaying data bars only on the values within your visual,
  • Values and totals: extending data bars to include both individual and corresponding totals,
  • Total only: displaying data bars only for the overall total.

This enhancement equips you with more control over your tabular visuals, which will reduce unnecessary noise and ensure a neater presentation.

Data label alignment

Another useful improvement in the reporting experience is adding the flexibility to horizontally align data labels in charts. As a result, you can easily create more organized visualizations, ensuring that all your labels are positioned optimally.

To try out this new feature, you need to navigate to the Data labels sections, choose Layout, and explore the horizontal alignment options.

Extended customization for data labels

Lately, Microsoft has also extended the customization option for data labels. These are:

  • The new title card feature enables you to display the legend fields on your data labels, allowing you to omit the legend and get a neater look. What is more, it enables you to customize data label titles by adding different data fields, adjustable font styles, colors, or transparency,
  • Facilitating to spot the active field for your data by customizing font, color, or transparency,
  • The new detail card feature allows you to include secondary metrics in your data labels. You can choose any field to add extra value by incorporating a wide selection of formatting options,
  • The new visual label layout allows you to choose between sleek single or multiple-line data labels.

Azure Maps visual now aggregates multiple data points at the same location and supports the bubble layer

Another useful improvement is aggregating points with the same latitude and longitude values in Azure Maps. With this, you can see all of them in one bubble instead of multiple data points plotted separately.

As a follow-up, there was an option to style cluster bubbles by choosing from a wide selection of options, such as bubble colors, font size, and more. Such a level of customization allows you to increase the user experience and visually emphasize certain aspects of the data, creating more impactful geospatial visualizations.

Narrative visual with Copilot

The old Smart Narratives visualization has been rebranded to Narrative with Copilot visual. It enables you to summarize data across your report or even specific pages or visuals by creating custom prompts and questions or using predefined ones.

As of now, users can decide whether they need the summarization of the entire report or specific pages or visuals, which gives them more flexibility. What is more, there are given references for each part of the summary that are aligned to visualizations on various pages of the report, which allows for easy validation of the accuracy of the summary.

Alerting on your Power BI reports with Data Activator

The announcement of the public preview of Data Activator back in Q3 2023 made Power BI users crave the alerting capabilities within their reports. It is now possible!

As a result, from now on, from the visual context menu or report toolbar, you can now set alerts and set measures you want to monitor or conditions you want to detect.

New Visual: 100% Stacked Area Chart

Moreover, there appeared a new visual in Power BI desktop, which is a 100% Stacked Area chart displaying the relative percentage of multiple data series in stacked areas where the total amounts to 100%.

It can help you show the proportion of individual series to the whole and show how it changed over time.

Line enhancements

Finally, you have been given more control over the line. From now on, you can adjust line color transparency (of specific series or all), use monotone or cardinal smooth type, or choose from before, center, and after step lines to better align your visuals.

Summing up, recently, the reporting experience in Power BI has been enhanced in many ways. Hopefully, at least some of these features will help you in your daily tasks and improve your user experience with Power BI. Now it is time to try them out, and see you soon in the next update!

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