Blog Topic Schedule
The next three topics on the blog schedule (each Sunday) have been pushed back a week. ‘Power BI Desktop versus Excel 2016 Feature Compare’ will have to wait until next week. I’m sorry to do this – especially with the volume of visitors and subscribers growing recently but I’ve just been very busy with Frontline Analytics and this (of course) is a higher priority. Additionally, I did produce two other posts this week: Sample PBIX, PBI Desktop September Update.
New Excel Features?
Per Ashvini Sharma on the MS Tech Community forum the Bidirectional cross-filtering feature available to SSAS Tabular 2016 and Power BI Desktop will ‘hopefully soon‘ also be available in Power Pivot for Excel. Without this feature, Power Pivot modelers have to use the CROSSFILTER() DAX function on a per-measure basis and have to write somewhat complex and sometimes less-performant DAX to resolve Many-to-Many scenarios . Kasper’s whitepaper on Bidirectional cross-filtering goes into great detail on the feature – it’s much more than just a solution for many-to-many relationships.
At his MS Ignite presentation ‘Identify and Illustrate Insights with new MS Excel charts’, B. Scott Ruble (Principle PM Manager) said, with regard to PBI Desktop and Excel, …”both of these applications have their strengths and what we’re trying to do is build tighter integration between these environments so you can start in one and migrate to the other….that integration isn’t complete yet but that is a process we’re going through right now”. I mentioned this quote in a previous post on Excel 2016 charts because it would be a significant outcome – better portability and integration between PBI Desktop, PBI Service, and Excel. Maybe more importantly, however, an upgrade path from these client tools (with Power Query) to SQL Server BI products such that you can leverage existing content in your PBI Desktop and Power Pivot models is surely something that MSBI teams will have to provide more guidance on soon.
The Roadmap for Excel slide that was in Olaf Hubel’s deck at Ignite along with Scott Ruble’s listed the following: Big Data, Machine Learning, Storytelling, Regular cadence of new functionality in O365, Democratization of DataViz, New Interaction Modes, Many Devices, Platforms, & Form Factors, Services, and Analysis/Exploration. It will be interesting to see details of these items become available over the next several months.
PBI Ideas Forum
These are the Power BI Feature Ideas I’m tracking most closely:
Global Filter is in ‘Planned’ status but seems to have been there (as opposed to ‘Started’ status) for at least two months. Integrate SSRS Reports is also in Planned status but Report-Scoped filters is still only under review. All three of these have high vote totals already and would benefit many projects so hopefully we’ll see more progress on these soon.
Two more notes:
- I may reach my goal this week of 175 lbs (30 lbs lost), we’ll see.
- Frontline Analytics may soon be listed as an official Microsoft Partner for Power BI projects. (Submission is under review)
Have a great week.
-Brett
Insight Quest 