Summary

The provided content outlines the latest Power BI features introduced in 2023, including datamarts, multi-language reports, an Apply All Slicers button, PowerPoint integration, and dynamic format strings for measures.

Abstract

The web content discusses significant enhancements to Power BI in 2023, emphasizing the introduction of datamarts which facilitate self-service analytics by allowing users to store and analyze data in a fully managed Azure SQL database without needing a database administrator. The update also includes multi-language support for reports, making Power BI accessible to a broader audience and improving collaboration in multilingual environments. A new feature, the Apply All Slicers button, allows users to apply multiple filters at once, optimizing report processing. Power BI's integration with PowerPoint has been improved, enabling users to embed interactive reports directly into presentations. Additionally, dynamic format strings for measures have been implemented, allowing for more flexible and context-aware formatting of numerical data in visualizations.

Opinions

The introduction of datamarts is seen as a bridge between business users and IT, providing a no-code experience and automated performance tuning.
Multi-language reports are considered beneficial for global collaboration, making Power BI more user-friendly for non-English speakers.
The Apply All Slicers button is viewed as a user-friendly feature that enhances the report interaction experience by allowing users to control when the report updates.
The improved PowerPoint integration is praised for preserving the dynamic nature of Power BI reports within PowerPoint presentations, which is seen as a significant advantage over static screenshots.
Dynamic format strings for measures are highlighted as a valuable feature for maintaining consistency and readability in numerical data representation across various contexts.

The Best of new Power BI features in 2023 vol. 1

2023 brings a lot of great new features to Power BI. Here are the most important ones.

Datamarts

Datamarts help bridge the gap between business users and IT. Datamarts are self-service analytics solutions, enabling users to store and explore data that is loaded in a fully managed database. Datamarts provide a simple and optionally no-code experience to ingest data from different data sources, extract transform and load (ETL) the data using Power Query, then load it into an Azure SQL database that’s fully managed and requires no tuning or optimization.

Once data is loaded into a datamart, you can additionally define relationships and policies for business intelligence and analysis. Datamarts automatically generate a semantic model or semantic model, which can be used to create Power BI reports and dashboards. You can also query a datamart using a T-SQL endpoint or using a visual experience.

Datamarts offer the following benefits:

Self-service users can easily perform relational database analytics, without the need for a database administrator
Datamarts provide end-to-end data ingestion, preparation and exploration with SQL, including no-code experiences
Enable building semantic models and reports within one holistic experience

Datamart features:

100% web-based, no other software required
A no-code experience resulting in a fully managed datamart
Automated performance tuning
Built-in visual and SQL Query editor for ad-hoc analysis
Support for SQL and other popular client tools
Native integration with Power BI, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft analytics offerings
Included with Power BI Premium capacities and Premium Per User

(source Power BI Blog)

Multi-language reports

Having multi-language functionality in Power BI is beneficial because it helps people who speak different languages to understand and use the tool easily. This means that whether you speak English, Spanish, or another language, you can work with Power BI comfortably. It makes reports and dashboards more accessible to a diverse group of users, making collaboration and communication smoother in a global or multilingual environment.

Apply All Slicers Button

This new button brings the possibility to postpone the processing of slicer changes until the user clicks on it. This is useful, especially when the most common scenario for the report is using multiple slicers. Originally, a change of every single slicer updates the entire report. Now, the user can choose values in all slicers and click on the Apply All Slicers button to update visuals accordingly.

If you want the user to decide which scenario he prefers, you can use bookmarks to hide the Apply All Slicer button.

Read more about Apply All Slicer button:

Power BI Blog — Apply all slicers button

PowerPoint integration

PowerPoint is still the main presentation tool for many companies, and putting print screens from Power BI into PowerPoint was disabling one of the main benefits of Power BI reports, the possibility to adjust reports dynamically on the fly.

With improved and now generally available PowerPoint integration, you can embed full Power BI reports or specific visuals and deliver full report flexibility directly from PowerPoint without switching to Power BI.

Dynamic Format Strings for Measures

This new feature allows dynamically format displayed values for measures in Power BI visualizations. Typically, we will use it in case we would like to change the format of numbers based on their value or based on currency type. This helps to keep numbers in visualizations in a compact format.

Read more about Dynamic Format Strings for Measures:

This is for the first part of The Best of 2023 for Power BI. Stay tuned for second part.

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