There were so many updates to Power BI this month I thought I’d put all the links to the information on the updates in one place so we can get caught up quickly on everything that changed with the tool this month. Down below you’ll find my commentary on which updates I’m most excited about and links to the Power BI blog to get all the information on all the changes!

New to Power BI? Start here.

The big one here, in my opinion, is the ability to use custom visuals! Not only can you create your own visualizations to meet your organization’s needs, you can download other custom visualizations that have been shared in the Power BI Visuals Gallery. Some of these custom visuals are just awesome. The capabilities of this tool are off the charts (see what I did there?)!

Some of my favorites are:

The Calendar Visualization

The Radar Chart

The Synoptic Panel

And there are lots more! This is huge! I predict that we’ll very quickly see even more powerful custom visuals that will really open up the potential of Power BI! There are already lots of other custom visuals shared on the Power BI Visuals Gallery so go check them out.

Another really nice update I’m enjoying is the ability to consume SSAS KPIs. As of now, we still can’t design KPIs in Power BI, but at least we can consume them in our Power BI reports. This means the ability to build KPIs will be here soon! 🙂

Also, in the October 20 weekly service update, a very helpful improvement is the ability to add featured Power Q&A questions to each Power BI dataset. I think this will be very helpful to the users by giving them hints and tips on how to use Power Q&A. Many users are not used to typing out simple questions and statements to see the data they need so I think this feature will go a long way in increasing the usability of the tool for the users.

All the Power BI Updates

There are so many updates to Power BI this month I couldn’t possibly mention them all, but I’ve provided the links down below so you can read through all the changes.

Read all about the Power BI October update here.

Power BI weekly service update (October 28, 2015)

Power BI weekly service update (October 20, 2015)

Power BI weekly service update (October 13, 2015)

Power BI weekly service update (October 6, 2015)

Feedback?

Which Power BI updates are you most excited about?