The Microsoft Power BI team was fast and furious in 2015, and there are no indications they are slowing down in 2016. If you haven’t checked out Power BI V2 since it was first released last summer, you might want to take another look. Many features have been added and updated since then. Based upon the release schedules since July, it seems there are 3 separate release cycles for Power BI:
- The Power BI Service (PowerBI.com) gets weekly updates.
- The Power BI Desktop tool gets monthly updates.
- The Power BI mobile apps get monthly updates.
Get the Latest Information on New Features
If you have been using the new version of Power BI, you might have noticed a new feature and wondered how long it’s been there or what other features have been added. You can likely find the answers to those questions on the Power BI documentation site. It has a “What’s New” section for Power BI Service, Power BI Desktop, and Power BI Mobile Apps that lists the changes and the related blog posts that contain detailed explanations.
If you follow the Power BI Blog, you’ll see the feature update blog posts as they are published, in addition to posts about new content packs, custom visuals, and successful use cases.
Influence What New Features Will Be Added to Power BI
You can be more than just a consumer of Power BI. You can help shape the product by sharing your ideas with Microsoft and other Power BI users. You can log ideas, see what suggestions other users have submitted, and vote for suggestions at Ideas.PowerBI.com. The Power BI team responds to these ideas and lets us know their status. If there is a feature that would increase adoption or usefulness of Power BI for you or your organization, you can log it and be notified when it’s under development and complete.
What Are Some New Features I Should Check Out?
Many great features have been released in the last couple of months. Check out the video to see some of my favorites. These include support for R scripts and visuals, better control for visual layout in reports, Quick Insights, and the ability to pin Excel ranges and charts to dashboards.
For an overview of the concepts and capabilities available in Power BI, check out Melissa Coates’ post on BlueGranite’s blog. Please contact us if you’d like to setup a more detailed discussion about Power BI and the updates we described in this article.
Is your organization deploying Microsoft Power BI?
BlueGranite offers hands-on, instructor-led training at your facility to help both business and IT teams adopt Microsoft Power BI for self-service business intelligence and analytics. Up to ten attendees will receive expert-led guidance through a complete set of hands-on labs and training modules. After the training, attendees will be able to acquire data, build data models, and create visualizations quickly and easily with Microsoft Power BI.
