Power BI Report Server January 2026 Feature Summary
Welcome to January 2026 Power BI Report Server feature summary! These updates bring new capabilities and enhancements across Reporting and Visualizations, maintaining our commitment to delivering powerful, flexible, and enterprise-ready reporting solutions. For more information on how to find your report server product key, refer to the documentation. Visualizations features This release includes a variety of new and updated visuals from Microsoft partners and the broader community. These visuals enable richer storytelling, advanced exploration, and more engaging report experiences. Activity Gauge by Powerviz Decomposition Tree – All Expanding Dynamic chart legends in Zebra BI Charts Drill Down Bubble PRO by ZoomCharts Power Gantt Chart by Nova Silva Turn any image into data insights with Synoptic Panel by OKVIZ Sankey Chart by Powerviz Your Timeline Slicer: Reimagining Date Filtering for Modern Dashboards Drill Down Scatter PRO by ZoomCharts Multiple Sparklines Performance Bar by JTA Financial Reporting Matrix v8.2 ADWISE Advanced Column v 2.0 Zebra BI Tables: Calculated Reports in One Click and Brand Images Word Cloud by Powerviz Drill Down Combo Bar PRO by ZoomCharts CAGR Arrows Now in Zebra BI Charts Reporting features This release also includes several reporting enhancements to improve layout behavior, visual styling, and interaction options to help you build polished, intuitive, and modern reports. Automatically expand matrix columns to fill available space Card visual (Generally Available) Enhancing Image visuals with styling, states, and more Button slicer (Generally Available) Automatically expand table columns to fill available space Performance analyzer available when editing a report in the web This concludes the feature summary for January 2026. Please follow this blog for updates on upcoming releases. As a reminder, Power BI Report Server releases occur in January, May, and September. Thank you for using Power BI Report Server!
Paginated reports supports Power BI language in the Power BI service
Paginated Reports now support all languages. The language used for report processing affects number, currency or date formatting (when using culture dependent formatters) or the processing of report expressions. One example is the execution time expression when used with a culture dependent 'full date/time' (“f”) formatter: For “en-US” For “de-DE” Learn more on culture dependent formatters. With this change, there is the potential to affect paginated report behavior. For instance, if your report is using an expression with a CDate function call with the date format "09-30-2024" with the Power BI language set to “de-DE” then it will now cause an error. The best practice is to use a VB date literal (ex. #9/30/2024#). VB date literals will always behave the same regardless of what Power BI language is set to. If you hit an issue like the one above, then there is quick workaround to fall back to the same behavior as prior to this fix. Simply set the RDL Report.Language property to “en-US”. Note: It is highly encouraged to fix the underlying issue in your RDL. Learn more about creating paginated reports in Power BI Report Builder, creating Power BI paginated reports in the Power BI service and exporting paginated reports.
Power BI July 2024 Feature Summary
Welcome to the July 2024 update. Here are a few, select highlights of the many we have for Power BI. Customize your reference layers in Azure Maps visual, DAX query view is available in live connect and an update to Power BI enhanced report format (PBIR). There is much more to explore, please continue to read on! European Fabric Community Conference Join us at Europe’s first Fabric Community Conference, the ultimate Power BI, Fabric, SQL & AI learning event in Stockholm, Sweden from September 24 -27, 2024. With 120 sessions, daily keynotes, 10 pre-conference workshops, an expo hall with community lounge, and “ask the expert” area, the conference offers a rich learning experience you don’t want to miss. This is a unique opportunity to meet the Microsoft teams building these products, customers betting their business on them, and partners at the forefront of deployment and adoption. Register today using code MSCUST for an exclusive discount! Attention Power BI users! If you are accessing Power BI on a web browser version older than Chrome 94, Edge 94, Safari 16.4, Firefox 93, or equivalent, you need upgrade your web browser to a newer version by August 31, 2024. Using an outdated browser version after this date, may prevent you from accessing features in Power BI. Version number: v: 2.131.901.0 Date published: 7/10/24 Contents Reporting Customize your reference layers in the Azure Maps visual Recently, we've been bringing you a lot of improvements to the Azure Maps visual, including reference layer support for a variety of new data formats. This month, we're excited to announce several more improvements to reference layers: CSV support, new customization options, and dynamic URL sources! First, the Azure Maps visual now supports CSV files as data sources for reference layers! Just as you can already use GeoJSON, Shapefiles, WKT, and KML files, you can now upload a CSV file instead in the reference layer section of the formatting pane. You can also now format reference layer shapes from within the formatting pane. Previously, Azure Maps required you to define the color and width of points, lines, and polygons from within your reference layer files. Otherwise, these shapes would be drawn on your maps with the default colors and formatting. This requirement brought additional complexity to working with your reference layers in Power BI, since the files needed more than just the data you intended to visualize. Now, we've added these standard formatting settings to each type of object in your reference layers in the formatting pane, so you can customize them directly from within Power BI! Lastly, for those of you who need your reference layers to change with time or other data-bound conditions, you can now provide a dynamic URL using conditional formatting! This allows you to set custom logic to determine the reference layer URL the Azure Maps visual will use. For example, you can load in different reference layers based on the categories selected by a slicer, like to visualize performance of different product lines over the same geography. We're still hard at work bringing you more improvements to the Azure Maps visual -- let us know what you think about these new capabilities and keep an eye out for further updates in the future! Modeling Announcing general availability of enhanced row-level security editor in Power BI Desktop We are excited to announce the general availability of the enhanced row-level security editor in Power BI Desktop! With this editor, you can quickly and easily create row-level security roles and filters. Simply choose ‘Manage roles’ from the ribbon to open the editor. By default, this will open an easy-to-use drop-down interface for creating and editing security roles all without having to write any DAX! If you prefer using DAX or need it for your filter definitions, you can switch to use the DAX editor to define your role. This is a rich editor complete with autocomplete for formulas (intellisense). It also allows you to easily verify the validity of your DAX expressions by selecting the check button and revert any changes by selecting the X button. At any point you can also switch back to the default editor by selecting ‘Switch to default editor’. All changes made in either editor persist when switching interfaces when possible, giving you maximum flexibility as you create your row-level security roles. Learn more information about Power BI row-level security including limitations in our documentation. DAX query view is available in live connect We heard your request and have added the ability to use DAX query view while live connected to a published semantic model. With this release you can write DAX queries with DAX query view when live connected to a published semantic model in Power BI Desktop! This includes live connecting to the amazing Direct Lake semantic models created in Microsoft Fabric. Live connects to your published Direct Lake, import, DirectQuery, or composite semantic model in Desktop and use the DAX query view to quickly view data without having to create any visuals. Use quick queries to have a DAX query generated for you from any table, column, or measure, and Copilot can help you as you write your DAX queries. This can be helpful to further your analysis beyond report authoring even when you are using a published semantic model managed by someone else. Try it out today and learn more about DAX query view. Add or update multiple measures in DAX query view Another popular ask for DAX query view is also now available – add or update the model with multiple measure changes. In a DAX query, you can use the DEFINE syntax to add a measure. These DAX query scoped measures are helpful for authoring DAX formulas and trying them out with different groups by columns before adding them to the model. In DAX query view, we made it easy to then add these measures to the model by clicking the text between the lines above the DEFINE MEASURE. DAX queries also allow you to define many measures at once, so it can be tedious to click each one. Now this task is very easy with the option to update the model with a single click for all measures! This can be handy to quickly format all your DAX formulas at once. In DAX query view, right-click in the Data pane and choose Quick queries > Define all measures in this model Click the Format query button in the ribbon. Click Update model with changes button. And you are done! Try it out today and let us know what you think by using the Share feedback button. Data connectivity Certified connector updates We’re pleased to announce the new and updated connectors in this release: [New] Windsor [Update] SingleStore [Update] Smartsheet [New] BuildingConnected Are you interested in creating your own connector and publishing it for your customers? Learn more about the Power Query SDK and the Connector Certification program. Service Storytelling in PowerPoint – New export to PowerPoint dialog To reduce complexity and drive more clarity we merged the two options to export to PowerPoint into a single dialog. You can now choose between embedding live data using Power BI add-in for PowerPoint and exporting the report as images from the same dialog. Developers New update for field parameter feature for custom visuals sourceFieldParameters is a new property in DataViewMetadataColumn that identifies whether a query field results from a field parameter resolution. If a single field can originate from multiple field parameters, this property will list all the related field parameters. This new update is available with API v5.10.0. Power BI enhanced report format (PBIR) update The following previously announced limitations of the PBIR format have been resolved: Can't be exported to PPTX or PDF. Can't be included in Subscriptions Mobile layouts aren't applied. Can't be utilized in Power BI Embedded. For further information regarding PBIR, refer to the documentation. Visualizations New visuals in AppSource Icon Map Pro StackedTrends Visual Smart Grid-Map Multilevel Matrix Xerppa Sankey Diagram Waffle Chart Maker Waterfall Chart SPC_Visual Linear Gauge by Powerviz Powerviz Linear Gauge is an advanced visual that is used to display the progress against set targets on a linear scale, with an axis displaying a range of values or percentages. The Linear Gauge quickly conveys the status or progress of a task or value being measured. Key Features: Gauge Styles: Four different gauges including Linear, Bar in Bar, Cylinder, Thermometer, and customization option. Templates: Select from pre-made templates or customize your own. Scale: Select an absolute or percentage scale, with a customizable min-max range. Targets: Set a custom target or apply a target using a value field. Data Colors: 30+ color palettes available. Band: 30+ color palettes and customization options. Labels: Improve readability with labels. Small Multiples: Divide visuals based on fields. Ranking: Filter Top/Bottom N shows remaining as “Others”. Other features included are fill pattern, annotation, grid view, show condition, and more. Business Use Cases: Sales Performance Tracking, Project Milestone Monitoring, Financial KPI Analysis, 🔗 Try Word Cloud Visual for FREE from AppSource 📊 Check out all features of the visual: Demo file 📃 Step-by-step instructions: Documentation 💡 YouTube Video: Video Link 📍 Learn more about visuals: https://powerviz.ai/ ✅ Follow Powerviz: https://lnkd.in/gN_9Sa6U Drill Down Map PRO by ZoomCharts When visualizing data with geographic coordinates, what better way to do it than literally placing it on a map? That’s why map charts are a growingly popular visualization type in Power BI reports, and the Drill Down Map PRO custom visual by ZoomCharts expands on the capabilities of map charts. Node Clustering: Multiple nearby nodes can create clusters and even display the values as pie charts. Simply zoom in to drill down. Base Layer Customization: Choose between AzureMaps or any custom tileserver, use your own images as the base layer, or disable it entirely. Custom Shape Layers: Enable up to 10 individually customizable shape layers. Use preset shapes or import your own KML/GeoJSON files. Conditional Formatting: Automatically apply color fill to each area by comparing their values against other shapes or by using each shape’s own reference value. And More: Paginated tooltip s, custom tooltip fields, auras, node images, lasso tool. Drill Down Map PRO works incredibly well with other visuals by dynamically cross-filtering data, enabling you to build even more insightful and user-friendly Power BI reports. 🌐Get Drill Down Map PRO on AppSource Product Page | Documentation | LinkedIn | Community PowerGantt Chart by Nova Silva We are excited to receive ongoing feedback from you and want to express our gratitude for your valuable contributions. Your insights help us make significant enhancements to our visuals. In the latest releases of the PowerGantt Chart, we have added many new features based on your feedback. These include the ability to show incomplete tasks and display progress as a separate column. We've also included links in the additional columns and enhanced their formatting options. You can now change the milestone shapes and wrap text in columns for better readability. Additionally, we've added the option to preset the zoom slider, expand and collapse all hierarchy elements, and add milestone labels. To further improve your experience, we've enabled the display and formatting of vertical grid lines. These updates are designed to provide you with more flexibility and control over your project visuals. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to receiving more of your valuable feedback. Together, we can keep enhancing PowerGantt Chart to meet your needs. Try the PowerGantt Chart for FREE now on your own project data by downloading it from the AppSource. Questions or remarks? Visit us at: https://visuals.novasilva.com/. Advanced Geospatial Analytics Made Simple with Icon Map Pro for Power BI Icon Map Pro, the new professional version of Icon Map, has been built from the ground up with an extensive set of new features and a simplified interface. This tool offers a robust solution for visualising and analysing geospatial data within Power BI. It is designed for data analysts, GIS specialists, and business intelligence professionals, addressing the need for seamless integration of geographic insights into BI dashboards. Users can effortlessly transform complex geospatial data into actionable visuals, enhancing decision-making and strategic planning with the intuitive low/no-code Power BI interface. Visit the supporting website iconmappro.com for: Extensive documentation Supporting videos Professional help and support Try Icon Map Pro for free from Microsoft AppSource Paginated Reports Bind to Gateway API support for paginated reports You can now bind your paginated reports to gateways with a REST API. This will allow paginated reports to connect to on-prem gateways without requiring users to go to the UI in the Power BI service and bind the report to the specified gateway. Learn more about the Bind to Gateway API for paginated reports. Parameters, Header/Footer and much more in the web authoring experience for paginated reports (Preview) We have introduced a new experience to web author paginated reports! It’s not just an update to the look and feel, but we’ve also introduced a host of new capabilities. You can now define parameters, headers, footers, page numbers in your web authored reports. The update will be rolling out in the coming weeks. Please check again in a couple of weeks, if you don’t see it. Once you select the fields, they will appear in the “Editor” along with a “Preview” of the report with sample data. You can move the table in the “Editor“and the preview will reflect the change as well. You can choose to add a header, footer, textbox or image. To add a footer, choose “Insert” and select “Footer”. Add a Text box, Image, page number and/or execution time. You can choose to display the footer and header on the first and last pages as well. You can exit the footer by clicking out. Once you are in the body of the report, you can “Create parameter”. By creating a parameter, you can create a report that requires the viewer of the report to enter one or more values to view the report. When you “Create parameter”, you can see the parameter at the top of the “Preview” portion of the screen. You can show/hide the parameter by clicking on the “Parameters” on the preview ribbon. When you save the report, it is saved with the parameter defined and the viewer of the report must specify the parameters to view the report. You can now share the report with others! This is a preview feature and will not be available on Sovereign clouds until we are generally available. Power BI Report Server Power BI Report Server key in Fabric Capacities Power BI Report Server is now included with F64+ Reserved Instance purchases. It continues to be available with SQL Server Enterprise core licenses with software assurance. You can get the PBIRS key in the “Fabric Capacity” tab under “Capacity Settings” in the admin portal. Learn more about ways to get the Power BI report server key. That is all for this month! We hope that you enjoy the update! If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store, please leave us a review. As always, keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next. We are looking forward to hearing from you! _SummaryGet data with Power Query available in Power BI Report Builder (Preview)
We are pleased to announce the ability to use the Get Data experience and connect to 100+ data sources such as Snowflake, Databricks and AWS Redshift from Power BI Report Builder. You can transform the data and select the M-Query to be used for the paginated report. All you need is the latest version of Power BI Report Builder Install Power BI Report Builder from the Microsoft Download Center. For this blog, we are creating an NYC Taxi Report paginated report with data in a Snowflake backend. To do this, launch Power BI Report Builder and navigate to the “Data” tab. Select “Get Data” from the toolbar. This will launch the “Get Data” experience. You can search for the data source that you want to connect to or “View more”. For this blog, I selected a Snowflake data source. Enter the server, warehouse and, credentials. You can use organizational accounts as well. Have questions? Learn more about the Power query online experience. You can either “Create a new connection” or use a shareable cloud connection. Learn more about shareable cloud connections. Choose data and select the table(s) that you want for your M-query. Select the “Transform data” button. Once you “Transform data”, the power query editor window will open. You can perform power query operations such as transforming and combining the data. The M query can also be modified in the editor. Learn more about Power Query. Select the “Create” button once you have the Query that you want as the dataset in Power BI Report Builder. You will see a success message, the dataset and, data source in Power BI Report Builder. Create the paginated report of your choice with the data from the data source supported via the Get Data experience. Once you create the report, you can Publish the report to the Power BI service. Learn more about publishing a paginated report to the Power BI service. You can share this report with others as well from the Power BI service. Prefer watching a video? Want to edit the dataset? You can right click on the dataset name and “Edit Mashup..” This will open the Get Data experience. Make updates that you want and select “Create”. The dataset will be edited based on the changes that you make. All functionality such as parameters and filters work like they do for any other data source in Power BI Report Builder. A few notes... This feature is currently not available to Sovereign clouds and will be available when generally available. With this version, we have limitations. The main ones are listed below. Learn more about current limitations and considerations. When there a multiple mashup queries in the editor, the last one is used for the dataset creation. You can add additional datasets from the same data source by going through the Get Data experience a second time and moving the intended M-query to the end of the "Queries" list. Parameters must be manually mapped by name between the mashup and the dataset. We currently do not support gateway connections. Next Steps Learn more about connecting to new data sources from Power BI Report Builder Give us feedback at ideas.fabric.microsoft.com. Please add "Power BI Report Builder" or "paginated" to the title and give us enough information to make improvements to meet your requirements.
VNet Data Gateway for Fabric and Power BI is now Generally Available
We're very excited to announce, that as of today, the VNET Data Gateway for Fabric and Power BI is now Generally Available! The VNET Data Gateway is a network security offering that lets you connect your Azure and other data services to Microsoft Fabric and the Power Platform. You can run Dataflow Gen2, Power BI Semantic Models, Power Platform Dataflows, and Power BI Paginated Reports on top of a VNET Data Gateway to ensure that no traffic is exposed to public endpoints. In addition, you can force all traffic to your data source to go through a gateway, allowing for comprehensive auditing of secure data sources. To learn more and get started, visit VNET Data Gateways. To learn more about billing and related best practices, visit VNET Data Gateway business model. The VNET data gateway securely communicates with the data source, executes queries, and transmits results back to the service. This month, we’re very excited to announce several enhancements to the VNET Data Gateway capabilities: VNET Data Gateway is Generally Available. VNET Data Gateway configuration updates. VNET Data Gateway pricing model. VNET Data Gateway is Generally Available Starting February 1 st 2024, VNET Data Gateway infrastructure is Generally Available for use within Microsoft Fabric (Dataflows Gen2, Power BI Semantic Models, Power BI Paginated Reports) and Power Platform (Dataflows). This means that customers are encouraged to start leveraging VNET Data Gateway for Production use cases, and expect the level of support, reliability and quality that goes with a Generally Available feature. We want to thank everyone who tried the VNET Data Gateway during Preview and shared feedback that helped us evolve and mature the capabilities to reach general availability. VNet Data Gateway configuration updates Starting in the next few days, we are introducing a new configuration setting to the VNET Data Gateways configuration page to bind a VNET Data Gateway to a Fabric or Power BI Premium capacity. VNET Data Gateway settings includes license capacity picker Binding to a capacity will be required in order to edit an existing VNET Data Gateway or create a new one. This capacity will be charged for VNET Data Gateway usage, as described in the following section. VNET Data Gateway Pricing Model The VNET Data Gateway is billed as an additive premium infrastructure charge, associated to a Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity. This means that it has its own meter and incurs a bill that is consistent across and additional to all artifacts. Total Bill of running an artifact through the VNET Data Gateway = Artifact Charge + VNET Data Gateway Charge The VNET Data Gateway Charge is proportional to your usage of the VNET Data Gateway; we define usage as uptime, or any time the VNET Data Gateway is on. A single VNET Data Gateway leverages two cores. CU consumption rate: 2x Price: 2x (CU Consumption rate) * 2 cores (per VNET Data Gateway) * $0.18 (Pay as You Go price for one CU per hour) = $0.72 per VNET / hour That's all for this month. We appreciate your continued feedback and suggestions around VNET Data Gateway enhancements. Please continue sharing it through the Fabric Ideas forum.
Power BI Report Server January 2024 Feature Summary
Happy New Year and welcome to the first release of Power BI Report Server, January 2024 Feature Summary! Before we dive into the feature summary, we want to call out an announcement: Announcement The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference Join us at the first annual Microsoft Fabric Community Conference and see firsthand how Microsoft Fabric and the rest of the data and AI products at Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. You’ll hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world and get hands on experiences with the latest features from Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Databases, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and more! Register today to immerse yourself in the future of data and AI and connect with thousands of data innovators like yourself eager to share their insights. Key Highlights With our team's commitment to accessibility improvements, Power BI customers will notice a continuation in the work that was done in the previous year. We are providing even more inclusivity for both creators and consumers in 2024! We have made it easier for report consumers with visual impairments to get tabular data for all visuals on a page with one selection, displaying the data in the way that best meets their particular needs with show visuals as tables, an added menu item. We promised you better looking reports, we are now delivering extended data labels, and more styling options, which improves aesthetics for column and bar charts, an added benefit for neurodivergent individuals with cognitive disabilities. Be sure to check below to learn more about each feature. Contents Reporting Show visuals as tables Leveraging our previous accessibility improvements to table and matrix, we are now introducing a new view mode called Show visuals as tables which displays report visuals in a tabular format with a single action. Some users may prefer to consume data in a text-based or tabular format depending on their different learning styles and usage of assistive technologies. This provides a supplemental format for visuals that allows users to display the data in the way that best meets their needs. This new view mode is similar to how Show as a table displays underlying data for individual visuals today. Show visuals as tables will display the underlying data for visuals for all pages in the current report, with the added functionality of interaction and cross-filtering capabilities. To activate this view mode, navigate to the view dropdown menu and select Show visuals as tables. Use the keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + F11 to toggle between the two views. More styling options for column and bar charts We’re thrilled to announce that this month brings many new formatting enhancements for column and bar charts in Power BI. These additions are designed to improve your data visualization, enabling more impactful analysis and storytelling capabilities. Here’s a quick look at the new features available now! Key Enhancements: Apply Settings to All or Series: Enjoy the versatility of applying formatting options globally across all categories or tailor them for each unique individual series, effortlessly and efficiently! Transparency Control: You can now adjust the fill color transparency to achieve the perfect balance of visibility and design. Border Customization: Gaining superior control, you can now introduce borders with unmatched precision, choosing a distinct color, or match it to the column’s fill, and define both the border’s width and transparency for a polished look. Layout: We’ve renamed the Spacing card to be the new Layout card, relocated the familiar Reverse Order toggle that allows you to invert series, and introduced Sort by Value, Space between categories, and Space between series. And, with clustered columns and bar charts, you now have the option to Erode or Explode the stacked series. Advanced ribbon settings: Highlight a series or create visual continuity with an array of options including matching series color or choosing a color selection, transparency, border color matching or color selection, border width, and border spacing. These features aim to provide you with greater flexibility and creative freedom in presenting your data, ensuring that your insights stand out with clarity and style. Enjoy exploring these new capabilities and crafting compelling narratives with your data in Power BI. If you’re looking to learn more comprehensive information about these new features we’ve rolled out for column and bar charts, look for our dedicated blog post. Extended customization for data labels Data labels are also getting more options this month! With this month’s update, you’ll discover some new enhanced capabilities for Data labels, giving you extended customization choices to seamlessly match your reporting needs, and it brings the simple integration of additional metrics, dramatically improving your data analysis experience. Here are this month’s highlights! Key Enhancements: Title: The new Title card feature enables the display of legend fields on your data labels, offering the option to omit the legend for a cleaner look. It also allows customized data label titles using different data fields, adjustable font style, color, and transparency. Value: Easily spot the active field for your data label in the field well. Modifying it to another field is quick and easy, with customization options like font, color, transparency, and more, plus a new feature for blank value display. Detail: Our new Detail card feature unlocks new potential by allowing the inclusion of a secondary metric to your data labels. Choose any field to add an extra value, with the full range of formatting options at your disposal. Visual label layout: A new feature that lets you choose between a sleek single-line data label or a multi-line data label, where desired. We invite you to explore these remarkable new features of Data labels to significantly enhance the data density in your charts. Available for Columns, Bars, Lines, and Ribbon charts, these advancements are ready to transform your reporting. We’re excited to hear your thoughts on these innovations and value your input on future Data Label enhancements! For more detailed information about these new Data label features, look for our dedicated blog post. Well, that concludes the feature summary for January 2024. Let us know what you think! Which features do you like the most, and why? Comment below. Continue to follow this blog for updates in the next release. Remember Power BI Report Server release cadence is September, January, and May. If you would like to be a part of our customer research for paginated reports and provide product feedback, prototype assessment and stay abreast with what’s new, register here. If you would like to join our Reporting Services - Migration to Power BI user group, register now. We’d love to have you join in the fun and tune in to our monthly events! As always, thank you for being loyal customers.Power BI Report Server September 2023 Feature Summary
Welcome to the September 2023 Power BI Report Server release! This release focuses on new features that enhance viewing, like the Report Server mobile view port improvements, full screen for PBIX and RDL viewing, and mobile layout switcher. We are excited to support bubble range scaling for Reporting. These features have been inclusively designed with better UX for report viewing and sharing! Please read on for all the details, and feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. Report Server Full screen view Responsive view navigation Reporting New layout switcher Mobile layout interactive canvas New bubble range scaling setting Report Server Full screen view Customers have requested the ability to allow report consumers to present reports in full screen mode. We are excited to share, we have fulfilled this request. The full screen viewing option has been added to the view menu for PBIX reports and to the toolbar for RDL reports. To change view, select the view menu item and choose full screen view as shown below. Full screen view in PBIX report The full screen view has been added to the toolbar in RDL reports, located on the far-right side of the pagination toolbar as shown in the image below. Full screen view in RDL report Responsive view navigation For customers logging into Power BI Report Server with varying devices, we have enhanced the view port for smaller screens. This makes viewing reports more accessible. Users no longer need to scroll across to locate menu items. The view port has responsive design enabled for smaller viewers. The additional menu items are collapsed to accommodate the smaller screen size. Reporting New layout switcher We’ve added new buttons that make it easy for you to quickly switch between web and mobile layouts while you’re developing your reports. You’ll find the new switcher buttons down at the bottom of the screen, right next to the page navigator. Mobile layout interactive canvas With this latest update we are happy to announce that we have made the mobile canvas interactive. This new capability provides the ability to test how buttons, slicers, and visuals will behave on the app before publishing the report. But that’s not all. With this canvas interactivity, users can now interact with visuals directly and adjust Table and Matrix column headers to align perfectly with mobile screens. New bubble range scaling setting We are introducing the new bubble range scaling setting for scatter chart and map visuals! This setting gives report creators more control over how the bubble (marker) sizes respond to the data, making it more accurate or distinctive based on preference. With the magnitude option, the bubble areas closely follow the data proportions. With the data-range option, the bubble size limits are mapped to data minimum and maximum. The auto option, which is the default setting for new reports, selects the appropriate option based on data characteristics. For more information, visit our docs. This setting can be adjusted in formatting panel, Markers > Shape > Range scaling for scatter charts or Bubbles > Size > Range scaling for maps. For reports authored in earlier Power BI versions, these settings default to (Deprecated) for scatter charts (which differs in handling negative values), and Data range for map charts. Azure Maps charts will also include this feature in a coming product update. In the figure above, the size of each country represents Urban Population, which is also shown on the y-axis. Well, that concludes the feature summary for September 2023. Let us know what you think! Which features do you like the most, and why? Comment below. Continue to follow this blog for updates in the next release. Remember Power BI Report Server release cadence is September, January, and May. If you would like to be a part of our customer research for paginated reports and provide product feedback, prototype assessment and staying abreast with what’s new, register here. If you would like to join our Reporting Services - Migration to Power BI user group, register now. We’d love to have you join in the fun and tune in to our monthly events! As always, thank you for being loyal customers.
Streamlining cloud connection management for datasets, paginated reports, and other artifacts
We are excited to announce the public preview of shareable cloud connections for datasets and paginated reports. Shareable cloud connections are the future for datasets and paginated reports and will soon become the connection type of choice! Before diving deeper, let’s review the various connection types that Power BI supports. At the highest level, there are connections created on a data gateway and direct cloud connections that don’t require a data gateway. Within these two categories, connections can be subdivided further into personal and shareable connections, as summarized in the following table. Data gateway connections Direct cloud connections Connections via a personal data gateway Personal cloud connections Connections via an enterprise or VNET data gateway Shareable cloud connections (new) Shareable cloud connections offer the following benefits that are not supported by personal cloud connections. Support multiple connections to the same data source. This is particularly useful if you want to use different connection settings for different datasets, paginated reports, and other artifacts. It is also useful if you want to assign individual artifacts their own separate connections so that their connection settings are isolated from each other. Let you share these connections with other users. You can assign other users Owner permissions so that they can manage all aspects of the connection configuration including credentials. You can give them Resharing permissions so that they can use and reshare the connection with others. And you can give them the User permission so that they can use the connection to bind their artifacts to the data source. Lower the overhead of maintaining data connections and credentials. With the recently released new data source and gateway management experience, you can centralize data source connection management for gateway and cloud connections. This is already commonplace for enterprise and VNET data gateways, on which a gateway administrator creates, shares, and maintains the connections. And you can now extend this centralized connection management to cloud data sources as well thanks to the availability of shareable cloud connections. Let’s review personal cloud connections in comparison to shareable cloud connections in the context of datasets. When you display the settings for one of your Power BI datasets that connects to a cloud data source, you can check if it is using an existing personal cloud connection. On the dataset settings page, open the Gateway and cloud connections section, under Cloud connections, note the Personal Cloud Connection option, as the following screenshot illustrates. Personal cloud connections can only create a single connection object to a given data source. All your datasets that connect to this given data source use the same personal connection object. If you changed the credentials of this personal connection, for example, you affected all your datasets that use this personal connection whether that is the desired behavior or not. Moreover, personal connections cannot be shared with others, so other users cannot bind their datasets and paginated reports to the personal connections you own. Fortunately, you can now have multiple shareable cloud connections for the same data source. So, if you have access to at least one shareable cloud connection to the same data source, you don’t have to use your one-and-only personal cloud connection anymore. Simply select the desired shareable cloud connection and click Apply. Your dataset can now access the data source with the configuration that the connection owner already defined for you. Of course, you can also create a new shareable cloud connection straight from the dataset settings page. In the connection listbox labelled Maps to, you can select the option to Create a connection, which brings you to the new data source and gateway management experience and populates the data source configuration parameters automatically, as in the following combined screenshots. This makes it easy to create separate shareable cloud connections for individual datasets if needed. But you can also display the connection management page from anywhere in the Power BI UI if you click on the Settings wheel in the upper right corner of the Power BI portal page and select Manage connections and gateways. For more details about managing connections and gateways see the new data source and gateway management experience blog article. For paginated reports, the user experience is basically the same as for datasets. If you uploaded a paginated report created by using Power BI Report Builder, connecting directly to a cloud data source, you can modify the cloud connections for the report by selecting Manage in the report context menu in the workspace. In the report settings, you can then select the desired shareable cloud connection from the connections that are available to you, as in the following combined screenshot. And that’s pretty much it for a quick glance at shareable cloud connection support in datasets and paginated reports. Just one final note. If you are planning to share your cloud connections with others, keep in mind that you are letting your co-workers connect their own datasets, paginated reports, and other artifacts to the corresponding data sources by using the connection details and credentials you provided. So, make sure you only share connections that you are authorized to share. And as always, please provide us with feedback as you try out shareable cloud connections with datasets and paginated reports and evaluate their usefulness for streamlining cloud connection management in your organization. We would love to hear from you!Low code authoring of paginated reports
We are excited to introduce an easy new way to create and export paginated reports on the Power BI service. You can create a simple paginated report such as an inventory report with an image, textbox and a table. You can export, save or share these reports. These reports can be created from a Power BI dataset by following the steps below: In Power BI’s left navigation pane, select the “OneLake data hub” to open a page where you can select your dataset/ datamart. You can read more here. Choose a dataset and select “Create paginated report”. You may see variations such as “Create operational report”. Today we support creating a paginated report from existing Power BI datasets, datamarts and Fabric data warehouses. You can also create a paginated report from your Workspace. Choose the dataset and select “Create paginated report”. You will see an editor canvas. You may choose to insert an image (say, a company logo) or textbox at the top of your report. Read more about inserting images and textboxes. You can also select columns from the “Data” pane. Selecting columns will add a table with a preview of the data to the report editor canvas. You can change the aggregation by selecting the dropdowns in the Build pane. You can also add/remove totals or disable totals for all columns, from the toolbar. You can filter the data in your table by applying filters. If you don’t want a column to appear in the table but do want to filter by it, you can drag and drop the field to the filter or right click on the Data pane. Read more about adding filters when you create paginated reports in the Power BI service. Edit column headers or re-position your table as desired. Re-naming the column header will NOT modify the column header in your dataset, only in the table in the report. Once you create the report, you can export to accessible pdf or Excel. All formatting including the new column header names, images and text boxes will be preserved. The video below walks you through the steps as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y26Ob07WjVc You can also look at the diagnostics of the report from the "View" tab in both "Editing" and "Viewing" modes. Read more about diagnostics for paginated reports. Editing mode: An example of the Diagnostics looks like below Follow Power BI blogs for regular updates on paginated reports!Power BI Report Server May 2023 Feature Summary
Welcome to the May 2023 Power BI Report Server release! This release has a number of great new features like the Report Server accessibility tagging for screen-reader report consumers, new accessibility for matrix navigation and selection as well as updates to existing features for Modeling, and Reporting. All of which has been inclusively designed for report authors and consumers to gain valuable insights! Please read on for all the details, and feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. Report Server Accessibility options for Row Properties Accessibility options for Text box Properties Reporting Conditional formatting based on string fields Formatting image width in table and matrix Customize visible pages in the Page navigator visual New accessible report themes Matrix accessibility improvements Visual container improvements Apply all slicers button, Clear all slicers button, and Optimization presets update Format Pane – new styling New tooltip auto-scale Measure driven data labels Mobile formatting options Modeling New DAX functions: LINEST and LINESTX New DAX functions: RANK and ROWNUMBER Report Server Since the announcement of Power BI Report Server for SQL Server 2022, we've continued to innovate, create, and design in a way that gives everyone the ability to achieve more. Designing for inclusivity reflects how people adapt to the world around them. In this new release of PBIRS, we’ve done more accessibility work to make sure we’re empowering people to achieve more. When working with Power BI, consider the different types of users who might interact with your reports. You can create reports that are easily navigated and understood by keyboard or screen reader users. Such reports enable users who might have visual or physical impairments to benefit from your reports. That is why we are announcing two new capabilities for paginated reports. Accessibility options for Row Properties Accessibility options are new features for report authors. They can be enabled from the Power BI Report Builder authoring tool. Accessibility options for row properties will allow report authors to tag rows for headers and data cells within a paginated report. To enable Row properties on a header or data cell, right–click on a table row and select Row properties in Power BI Report Builder. Choose the Accessibility menu and determine which structure type you wish to overwrite. Accessibility options for Text box Properties Text box properties works similarly. This will allow report authors to tag heading elements to text boxes within a paginated report. To enable Text box properties, right-click on a text box to select the Accessibility menu and determine which structure type you wish to overwrite. You can add Heading tags H1-H6 to give the text box a different semantic meaning in output formats like HTML and Accessible PDF. Report authors and report consumers can now benefit from having accessibility tagging for tables, matrixes and text box properties for paginated reports in just a few clicks. When you add this tagging to a row property and/or a text box property, you provide a better report navigation user experience for report consumers who use screen-readers. To learn more about accessibility options, please check out our accessibility guidance documentation on authoring and consuming paginated reports. Don't forget to update to the newest Power BI Report Builder to get accessibility options! Would you like to know what’s coming in future capabilities to paginated reports which will be more inclusive and accessible, or would you like to contribute by providing feedback to influence paginated reports product roadmap? Please join our user research panel. Reporting Conditional formatting based on string fields This month, you can now set conditional formatting rules based on string fields! We know that many of you have been asking for this feature, so we’re excited to be bringing you this feature and hope you find it a powerful new conditional formatting capability. You can access this new capability in the same way other conditional formatting: through the dialog which opens up from selecting an option in the formatting pane. For example, in column charts, you can conditionally format column colors by selecting the fx button in the Columns card of the formatting pane. In the dialog, select “Rules” through the Format style dropdown, then base these rules on a string field and select a summarization. Before, your summarization options were only numeric – Count and Count (Distinct). Now you’ll see First and Last options as well, which will give you strings to write logic around. In the example below, we add a simple rule to check that the value of the string is Audio, and if it is, we color the column red. Then we hit OK, and the Audio columns of our visual will now be colored red! We’ve added a variety of comparator options to the conditional formatting dialog, including “is”, “starts with”, “ends with”, and more. Keep in mind that these comparisons will check your fields against your inputs for exact character matches, including case-sensitivity. As always, let us know what you think about the feature and ideas you have to improve this or any other aspects of Power BI! Formatting image width in table and matrix Image dimensions in table and matrix visuals can now be individually formatted. Prior to this release, there was only one control for image dimensions in table and matrix cells. Despite being labeled as “image height”, this setting in the formatting pane controlled both the width and height of images, causing them to take up square space regardless of their actual dimensions. This caused layout problems, especially when images were wider than they were tall, as rows then took up far more vertical space than necessary. Now that you can change image height and width separately, you can adjust your cells to give your tables or matrices a lot more room! Customize visible pages in the Page navigator visual You can now easily decide which report pages are visible within the Page navigator visual. If you want to exclude specific pages, all you need to do is expand the Show card in the Pages section of the formatting pane. Here you’ll see the list of pages that are not already hidden through the “Show hidden pages” or “Show tooltip pages” options. All you need to do to hide specific pages is turn the toggle for that page to Off. If you have many pages in your report that you want to hide within the Page navigator visual, it can be faster to instead just specify which ones you specifically want to show. To do this, turn the Show all by default toggle to Off in the Options card, which will immediately turn all pages within the Show card to Off. From there, you can then go in and just turn back on the specific pages you want visible. New accessible report themes This month, to promote authors creating accessible reports with good contrast across their colors, we’ve added some new accessible report themes to the theme dropdown in the View tab of the ribbon: You’ll find them in a new section labeled Accessible themes. Matrix accessibility improvements We are excited to announce several enhancements to the matrix visual for existing and new reports to improve usability and accessibility for all users. These updates include: Improved keyboard navigation and new keyboard shortcuts, including Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End to quickly traverse data in large matrices. More shortcuts are listed here: Keyboard shortcuts in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Learn A two-toned focus outline that will always be visible even in darker backgrounds, meeting color contrast requirements. New support for screen reader announcements to convey matrix structure and interactions. Added screen reader support for conditional formatting icons and data bars. Removed browser (default) tooltips for values that aren’t truncated. Overall performance improvements for scrolling and rendering, with an updated scrollbar style. Learn more about consuming Power BI reports using accessibility features. Visual container improvements With this release, we are introducing three key features to help you customize your visuals' container. Subtitle You can now turn on a subtitle that can be used to add extra context to your visuals. You'll find the new "Subtitle" toggle in the Title settings card of the formatting pane. Divider To visually separate the visual header from its contents you can add a divider line. You can find the "Divider" option in the Title settings card of the formatting pane, below the new "Subtitle". Here’s the visual container with Subtitle and Divider on: Spacing In addition to the Subtitle and Divider on your visual container, you can control the space below each component. You'll find the "Spacing" setting at the bottom of the Title settings card of the formatting pane. Padding You can now control the container's margin to create a negative space making the visuals look more professional and appealing. You'll find this new option in the Properties card of the formatting pane Apply all slicers button, Clear all slicers button, and Optimization presets update When we released the Public Preview of the Optimize ribbon with Pause visuals for authoring reports, many of you asked for a way to allow your report consumers to make slicer selections and have the report visuals only update when they have finished making all slicer selections. The wait is now over! We are happy to announce the availability of the Apply all slicers button! The Apply all slicers button can be added in three ways: From the Optimize ribbon > Apply all slicers button From the Insert ribbon > Buttons > Apply all slicers Or, simply by choosing the Apply all slicers action on any existing button in your report. You can add as many of these buttons as you like to your report page. When at least one of them is visible on the page, all the slicers on your report page will take selection changes but will only apply them to the other report visuals when the button is clicked. If you hide or delete the last Apply all slicers button on a report page, then the slicers simply behave like they did before, generally instantly applying the selections as you make selections. This Apply all slicers button is like the existing single apply button on slicers in that they both do not apply the slicer selections to other visuals until you click the button. Unlike the single apply button on slicers, the Apply all slicers button will allow you to make selections across multiple slicers and then apply them in one click! For the best query reduction experience with slicers, we recommend you use the Apply all slicers instead of the single apply button for slicers. The single apply button for slicers is still available and will continue to work on existing reports. The Optimization preset for Query reduction has been adjusted to no longer add the single apply button for slicers on slicers, and instead recommends the Apply all slicers button. Additionally, a popular idea on the Power BI Ideas forum is for a Clear all slicers button, which has been also added with the Apply all slicers button! When there are several slicers on a report page and you want a way to quickly clear all their selections, add the Clear all slicers button and your report consumers can do so in one click! Finally, the Optimize ribbon with Pause visuals, Optimization presets, and the quick access to Apply all slicers button is on by default as a preview feature starting this release. Format Pane – new styling To address customer feedback on the depth perceived by the white background and drop shadow treatment causing dizziness from the new format pane, we’ve darkened the style, and added borders instead of drop shadows when OS setting for reduced motion is enabled. Current format pane New format pane style With reduce motion setting New tooltip auto-scale With this release, we will be adding a user preference setting to allow tooltips to auto-scale based on the canvas' size under Options > Report settings > Tooltip auto-scale Measure driven data labels This release will introduce an exciting new label capability that allows you to easily swap out your default data labels with more meaningful values based on your chosen field or measure. This measure-driven data label feature is just a taste of the great improvements that await you in the coming months. Get ready! Mobile formatting options We've now added mobile formatting options that significantly improve the authoring experience for mobile-optimized reports. With these new capabilities, you can style and format visuals in a mobile-optimized layout without affecting their formatting in web layout. This gives you greater flexibility and opens up a world of design possibilities for creating beautiful reports that are truly optimized for phone viewing. For more details about the new capabilities, check out our documentation. Modeling New DAX functions: LINEST and LINESTX This month, we are introducing two new statistical DAX functions: LINEST and LINESTX. These two functions perform linear regression, leveraging the Least Squares method, to calculate a straight line that best fits the given data and return a table describing that line. These functions are especially useful in predicting unknown values (Y) given known values (X). Both functions return a single-row table describing the line and additional statistics. The resulting table includes columns such as slopes, intercepts, standard errors, and the coefficient of determination. The equation of the fitted line can be constructed: Y = Slope1 * X1 + Slope2 * X2 + …+ Intercept. The difference between LINEST and LINESTX is that LINEST expects columns of known X and Y values to be provided, whereas LINESTX expects a table and expressions to be evaluated for each row of the table to obtain the X and Y values. For the following examples, I use the following data, which includes Sales Amount and gross national product (GNP) per capita: In the example below I use LINESTX to predict total sales based on GNP per capita: LinestX_example = VAR CountryGNP = SUMMARIZE( Sales, 'GNP_Country'[Country], 'GNP_Country'[GNP_Per_Capita], "Total Sales", SUM(Sales[Sales Amount]) ) VAR SalesPrediction = LINESTX( 'CountryGNP', [Total Sales], [GNP_Per_Capita] ) VAR Example_GNP_Per_Capita = 50000 RETURN SELECTCOLUMNS( SalesPrediction, [Slope1] ) * Example_GNP_Per_Capita + SELECTCOLUMNS( SalesPrediction, [Intercept] ) This expression not only leverages LINESTX but also leverages the result to perform a prediction for a fictious country with gross national product per capita of $50,000. The result is a predicted total sales of $17,426,123.29. Of course this is a fabricated scenario and it’s rare to have a fixed value such as the $50,000 above as part of the expression. I can do the same using LINEST assuming the required tables are all in the model, for example as calculated tables. In this example, I added the following calculated tables: CountryDetails, defined as: CountryDetails = SUMMARIZECOLUMNS( 'GNP_Country'[Country], 'GNP_Country'[GNP_Per_Capita], "Total Sales", SUM(Sales[Sales Amount])) SalesPredictionLINEST, defined as: SalesPredictionLINEST = LINEST('CountryDetails'[Total Sales], 'CountryDetails'[GNP_Per_Capita]) Now I can use following measure expression to obtain the same result as above: Linest_example = VAR Example_GNP_Per_Capita = 50000 RETURN MAX ( SalesPredictionLINEST[Slope1] ) * Example_GNP_Per_Capita + MAX ( SalesPredictionLINEST[Intercept] ) To learn more about these functions, see their documentation pages: LINEST and LINESTX. New DAX functions: RANK and ROWNUMBER This month we are adding two more functions that will make your life easier, especially when doing rankings: RANK and ROWNUMBER are joining the DAX ranks! These functions return a number indicating the rank for the current context within the specified partition, sorted by the specified order. The difference between RANK and ROWNUMBER is that if there is a tie (i.e., two rows would get the same rank assigned) ROWNUMBER will return an error, whereas RANK will just assign the same RANK multiple times. Notice returning an error is a last resort; ROWNUMBER will try to avoid doing that by finding the least number of additional columns required to uniquely identify every row and append these new columns to the ORDERBY clause. Only after it is unable to uniquely identify every row, ROWNUMBER will return an error. These functions rely on the ORDERBY and PARTITIONBY functions. In the following example, we have a list of customers and their birth dates. I have added the following measures to my model: RankByBirthDateSkip = RANK(SKIP, ALLSELECTED(DimCustomer), ORDERBY(DimCustomer[BirthDate])) RankByBirthDateDense = RANK(DENSE,ALLSELECTED(DimCustomer), ORDERBY(DimCustomer[BirthDate])) RowNumberByBirthDate = ROWNUMBER(ALLSELECTED(DimCustomer), ORDERBY(DimCustomer[BirthDate])) This is the first part of the output: All measures here return the same result. However, for customers that share a birthday, the results are different: Notice how both Donald Garcia and Kayla Garcia are both on the same date. Using RANK with the ties parameter set to SKIP (the default) assigns them a rank of 41. The same happens when using RANK with the ties parameter set to DENSE. However, notice that the next customer receives a different rank (43 when the ties parameter is set to SKIP and 42 when set to DENSE). By contrast, ROWNUMBER gives Donald and Kayla a unique rank (41 and 42) as it expands the ORDERBY clause to try to unique identify these customers and is successful in doing so. Read more about RANK and ROWNUMBER in our documentation. This concludes our May release summary. We hope that you have enjoyed reading about some of the new features we are offering! Please submit your comments below to continue the conversation. As always, we would love to hear from you!
