Power BI Change Log and Release Notes – One for the reference

With very frequent updates of the different parts of the Power BI Universe it is not easy to follow all the updates and – to track a history of changes and new features.

In many of my Power BI workshops, the attendees ask how to keep track of all those fast movement and changes and I often answer with… “Well – it depends and there are several pages where the change history is tracked..”

And that is the main purpose of this post – to start a summary of those links – where you (and myself) find the change history of Power BI applications.

Power BI Blog

One of the main resources is the Power BI Blog – including all the Power BI related announcements

• https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/
  • use the category “Announcements” to filter for announcement posts: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/category/announcements/

Change Log / Whats New Pages

Power BI Desktop

The Power BI Desktop teams tracks all changes in the product on a single page (including all released versions)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/desktop-latest-update-archive

Power BI Service

Many features in the Power BI Service are dependent on Power BI Desktop changes – but sometimes they are released in a different cadence.

Have a look at the Power BI Service What’s New page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/service-whats-new

Power BI Mobile Apps

The new features and changes for the mobile apps are tracked on the What’s New page here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/consumer/mobile/mobile-whats-new-in-the-mobile-apps

On-Premises Data Gateway

The 2020 updates of the gateway changes are listed here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-monthly-updates

I haven’t really found a consolidated page for gateway changes before 2020, but if you use the tag “gateway” to search in the Power BI blog you’ll get a list of posts related to the gateway changes:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/tag/gateway/

Power BI Report Server

Every release of Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) is tracked on the following page. Not only the main releases (i.e. May 2020) but also the released minor versions (and hotfixes) are listed

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/report-server/changelog

PBIRS What’s New page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/report-server/whats-new

winget – How To Select The Right Application If Multiple Selections Are Available?

Following up my getting started post about the new Windows Package Manager, winget I almost struggled during one of my first installation attempts.

Installing PowerToys was easy, but I almost was forced to stop when I tried to install PowerShell using winget. Why? I will tell you..

My first action was to query the package listing using the search parameter. winget lists four application (as of today) containing PowerShell either in the name or in some magic tags.

And now, the show began. I planned to go for PowerShell v 7.0.1 and first tried the command

winget install PowerShell

followed by a

winget install Microsoft.PowerShell

hmmm.. this did not work out because winget could not catch my required application. So I had a look at the documentation which added some more parameters to try.

None of the additional parameters for the install command did help.

My last – and successful – try was to use the parameter -e (for exact)!

Attention:

• surround your search phrase with quotation marks – this did the trick for me!
• the search string is case-sensitive!

winget install -e "Microsoft.PowerShell"

Happy winget-ing! Enjoy the packages installing.. 🙂

Welcome, winget!

At Microsoft Build 2020, the new Windows Package Manager winget was announced. I am already using Chocolatey since a few years, but wanted to give the new kid in town a try..

First – How To Get It?

It’s a preview release right now and therefore you have to take some actions to get the winget executable onto your machine.

The first search result I found for installation guidance was the following site https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/ where the text mentions that you need the Windows App Installer on your machine..

The App installer is a wrapper with the purpose of enabling sideloading Windows 10 applications possible (and easy). It’s not the Package Manager itself, it’s the application that allows you to install it on your machine!

First – Subpoint 2 – Install it

Well, this was not that obvious for me in the beginning. The documentation state several tools that I should install, some options to register, … to get the package manager on my machine.. But: After some trial attempts, I found out that I do not needed all that stuff..

The magical page for installing the required appbundle package (the one that really contains the package manager) can be found here: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/releases. If you have the App Installer on your machine, you only need to open the link to the *.appxbundle file and this downloads and installs the application on your machine.

Second – Try It

Installation is done – let’s try it. The only thing you need is to open a command prompt or a PowerShell prompt or start the new Windows terminal. It does not matter which one you use.. I’ll stick to the good old command prompt.. 🙂

Let’s try if winget is installed correctly

And now – the question is: which programs are currently made available by winget? Let’s query the list of application by issuing the command

winget show 

this is only a partial listing of available applications provided by winget

If you are looking for a specific application or search team you can search the package repository using

winget search <searchterm>

If you want to get some more information about an application, the command

winget show <SearchTerm/Applicationname>

is your friend. The output of this command lists the description, the version plus the download URL …..

Querying the package list is nice … but the purpose of a package manager is to install and maintain application installations. This action can be started with the command

winget install <applicationname>

In my example, I start the installation of the Microsoft PowerToys. winget downloads the package, starts the installation and that’s it.. No more searching for the download link, no manual installation.. winget does the magic for you!

Last – Use it!

I hope you enjoyed the quick overview about the new winget experience. After finding the right link, the installation is pretty easy as well is the usage of winget

If you need some more information about the available command line parameters – documentation is your friend!

With that, have fun and winget your applications!

All the Power BI and Power Platform News – Recordings of all Business Application Summit Sessions

Because of COVID-19, this years Microsoft Business Application Summit (MBAS) was changed into a virtual only event. The online event itself went smooth with plenty of announcements for all Power Platform technologies including my favorite: Power BI!

Because the event was shorter (1 day) compared to the multi day conference in the past years, the sessions had to be shortened (~30 minutes) and ended very packed with announcement after announcement.

Sometimes it was hard to catch all the details BUT luckily the MBAS team gave us all the sessions as on-demand sessions!

You only need to open the link to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/businessapplicationssummit and browse the session catalog!

In addition to the recorded live sessions, the team added more pre-recorded on-demand sessions (you’ll find them with a session code starting with OND***)

All the MBAS 2020 sessions are available for on-demand viewing!

My favorite Power BI sessions are:

• Empower your organization with the Microsoft Power Platform (Arun and Charles)
• Unlock insights: Power BI vision and roadmap (Arun and Amir)
• My highlight – Modern Enterprise BI (Christian Wade) – see composite models with AS and PBI models in action!
• How to accelerate a data culture with pervasive BI (Amir and Will)
• And some awesome AI features – Create amazing data experiences with Power BI (Justyna)

What is your favorite Power BI feature? What are you most looking forward to?

Happy Power BI-watching!

Wolfgang

It’s MS Business Applications Summit Time…

It’s the time of the year – It’s #MSBizAppsSummit Time… after events in Seattle and Atlanta .. well this years event is held online! The countdown is on and we are eagerly waiting for all the announcements and informations all around the #PowerPlatform and MS BusinessApplications.

Have a look at the event page for more informations… https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/businessapplicationssummit

But now.. it’s livestream time…

Before the event – it’s community and success story time…

Jon and Dona are joined by Elaiza, Adam and Patrick!

Get social!

#MSBizAppsSummit is the official hashtag for the event.. let’s spread the news about the event!

Go Community

Did you know that there is a single starting point for all #Powerplatform communities? https://powerusers.microsoft.com/

 

Keynote Time

Alysa Taylor and James Philips are kicking of the event – including social distancing done right..

Keynote abstract

James Phillips, President of the Microsoft Business Applications group, will share the latest product strategy, highlights from the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 release, and how those innovations can benefit you.

Alysa Taylor, CVP of Business Applications marketing, will talk about what businesses need from a technology partner today, how Microsoft is helping organizations around the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and what we’re doing as a business applications team to move forward together.

 

 

What is planned in the next months?

If you want to have a look at the upcoming features that are planned in the next months for the PowerPlatform

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/

 

 

 

 

Shoutout to the Fasttrack solution architects for the PowerPlatform

 

LIV02: Empower your organization with the Microsoft Power Platform (Arun Ulag and Charles Lamanna)

 

Charles kicks off the session about a PowerPlatform round trip

 

• Direct Query from Power BI to Common Data Service
• T-SQL endpoint for the Common Data Service

 

And now it’s Power BI time with Arun

 

Building a Data Culture

 

One of my highlights (and available as of today) – Personalize visuals (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-new-personalize-visuals-experience-for-power-bi-reports/).

Meet the needs of enterprises

 

• Application Lifecycle Management for Power BI datasets
• Lineage and Impact Analysis
• XMLA read/write and composite models

PowerPlatform Focus for 2020

 

Unlock insights: Power BI vision and roadmap (Amir Netz and Arun Ulag)

How to close the gap between data and decisions?

 

 

Make Power BI the Powerpoint for Data

• Better Onboarding
• Templates
• Small multiples
• AI infused experiences (Decomposition tree, smart narratives, Anomaly detection)

 

 

Make Power BI the Data Culture Engine of the Organization

 

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-power-bi-lineage-view-ga-and-introducing-dataset-impact-analysis/

 

Integration and Data Stack

 

Create amazing data experiences with Power BI (Justyna Lucznik, Amir Netz)

Decomposition Tree gets Direct Query support and conditional formatting

 

Let Power BI tell a story about a visual or your report page – Smart Narratives

 

Lasso select even inside a visual

 

Powerpoin for Data – Templates

 

Modern Enterprise BI (Amir Netz, Christian Wade)

External Tools support in Power BI Desktop

• ALM Toolkit
• DAX Studio
• Tabular Editor

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to accelerate a data culture with pervasive BI throughout your organization (Amir Netz, Will Thompson)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Power BI Announcements

• Arun Ulag about Driving a data culture – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/driving-a-data-culture-from-insight-to-action/
• Power BI Desktop April 2020 Release – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-april-2020-feature-summary/
• Personalize Visuals Experience – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-new-personalize-visuals-experience-for-power-bi-reports/
• What is planned in the next months? PowerPlatform release plan – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/
  • Power BI roadmap – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/business-intelligence/
• Power BI and Excel – Better together – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/simplifying-enterprise-data-discovery-and-analysis-in-microsoft/ba-p/1354160

Global Azure 2020 goes Virtual – My PowerPlatform Dataflows session

2020-04-24: updated with slide download link!

2020 is different! The Corona virus changed our lives and well, .. everything..

HomeOffice, social distancing and – no in-person conferences! Therefore, the Global Azure Bootcamp 2020 goes virtual! Instead of a world wide series of in-person events, many virtual events were introduced.

As in the past years, there will be an Austrian Global Azure Edition organized by Rainer Stropek and his team! This years event was planned to take place in a cinema.. which would have been a great experience.. but …

The Austrian Global Azure Edition takes place on Friday, 24th April and will have four parallel tracks. The sessions will be streamed using Teams Live Events.

Have a look at the schedule – many different Azure topics will be presented during the day.

My session – PowerPlatform dataflows (link to session)

Starting at 3pm I will talk about one of my favorite topics – PowerPlatform and data integration!

With PowerPlatform dataflows, users can bring PowerQuery functionality to a cloud-only life. Created in the cloud, processed in the cloud and storing results in the cloud, dataflows can be seen as cloud native part of the ETL within the PowerPlatform.

After their initial start in the Power BI universe, they now reached out into other parts of the PowerPlatform and be one of the future options of ETL pipelines to transfer data into data lakes.

In addition to data transformation, dataflows can be enriched with AI functionality to bring more ML power into your ETL processes.

Join this session if you want to learn more about the current feature set available and see what is new and possible with data preparation in the cloud with PowerPlatform dataflows.

2020-04-24: Download the slides here..

GlobalAzure Austria is part of International GlobalAzure

Today I got notice, that our (local) sessions are now also listed on the global virtual.globalazure.net site!

Can you spot my profile picture? 😉

See you online on Friday – Have fun, learn and enjoy the online-event!

Power BI Desktop – February 2020 – Please wait to use it!

At the beginning of this week, the February 2020 Release of Power BI Desktop was released. It includes many new features and users are eagerly waiting to try those out. With the Windows Store version, the update is automatically rolled out and installed on your machine. In most of the cases, this automatic process is great to be up to date with the latest Power BI Desktop version.

In the February 2020 version, there are some hick-us that prevented users around the world to successfully open their existing PBIX files in Power BI Desktop.

The Power BI Support page (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/support/) mentions those problems and the team is already working on a fix.

 

If you are affected by this issue, please downgrade to the December release of Power BI Desktop OR set the Regional Format to “English (United States)”.

 

The updated version of Power BI Desktop should be available (according to the support page) at the end 2020-02-22.

It’s #SQLSatVienna 2020 time..

In less than three weeks, it’s time for another edition of #SQLSatVienna. Like in the past, we are guests at the JUFA hotel in Wien where both, the preconference full-day workshops AND the conference day will take place.

Full-Day Workshops

On Thursday, 23^rd January 2020 you can choose from four different full-day workshops. A registration for the workshops is mandatory!

• Execution Plans in Depth (Hugo Kornelis)
  
• Power BI Advanced Developer Course (Asgeir Gunnarson, Bent Nissen Pedersen)
  
• Enterprise analytics on-premises and in-cloud with SQL Server and Azure (Tomaz Kastrun)
  
• Columnstore Indexes: Practical Solutions & Techniques (Niko Neugebauer)
  

As of today, we are fully booked, BUT: All workshop attendees get an admission ticket for the conference day!

Conference Day

We have worked hard this year to provide an (hopefully) interesting schedule with six tracks in parallel!! All in all, 36 sessions ranging from SQL Server performance tuning, Power BI, Machine Learning, Data Science, DAX to Data Lakes and Cloud data platforms.

Community & Sponsoring

We are organizing the event (conference day) for free…

• Free for you as an attendee – you get a full, free day of education. Starting with coffee in the morning, sessions, lunch and breaks/drinks again..
• Free for us as organizers – we are not getting paid to organize the event. It’s done in our free time; it’s done in the evenings and weekends. But we love to support the community, we love to spread the news and knowledge about working with data and the Microsoft data platform landscape.
• Free for the speaker – speakers are travelling to our SQLSaturday for free! NO financial support is coming from our side – it’s their money, their time! What we can do for them is to welcome them in Vienna, make their stay a pleasant one and have a nice dinner evening together! What you can do is to THANK them at the event for the invested time and resources!

But how do we finance the event? It is only possible with the generous help of our sponsors! Without them, there would be no (free) #SQLSatVienna! Some of the sponsors will be onsite at the conference day – We would encourage you to visit their booth, talk to them and THANK THEM for their support!

In addition, if you or your company would like to support this years edition of #SQLSatVienna – it’s never too late to sponsor the event!

Have a look at the available sponsoring options and maybe there is an option that suites you .. http://Bit.ly/SQLSatViennaSponsor

With that,

See you at #SQLSatVienna 2020

Wolfgang

• https://www.sqlsaturday.com/917/eventhome.aspx
• https://www.sqlsaturday.com/917/Sponsors.aspx
• https://www.sqlsaturday.com/917/Sessions/Schedule.aspx

Power BI für Dummies – Jetzt erhältlich!

Jetzt ist es soweit – mein erstes Buch – Power BI für Dummies
–  ist ab 4. Dezember 2019 bestellbar. Nun ja, es ist nicht nur mein Buch, wir (= Tillmann Eitelberg (t), Oliver Engels (t), Frank Geisler (t) und ich (t)) haben es gemeinsam geschrieben. Wie der Titel vermuten lässt, haben wir eine Einführung in Power BI geschrieben. Vom Power BI Universum über das Datenmodell, dem Power BI Desktop, der Datentransformation mit Power Query, der Erstellung von DAX Formeln für die Kennzahlendefinition, dem Power BI Service und vielem mehr, haben wir die Themen mit zahlreichen Beispielen erklärt. Ihr könnt Euch nicht vorstellen, wie groß meine Freude war (und ist), als ich das erste gedruckte Buch in meinen Händen halten konnte. Frisch aus der Druckerpresse haben wir dieses gemeinsam am PassCamp 2019 in Seeheim feiern dürfen. Das Buch ist ab sofort bestellbar – wir würden uns freuen wenn du zu den Lesern gehörst!

• Power BI für Dummies bei Amazon
• Power BI für Dummies bei Thalia

Long time no see!

Hi everyone! May I re-introduce myself back to business 🙂

It’s been a tooooooo long time I’ve not been active on this blog.

Busy times, holiday, summer, projects, work, projects, work, not enough time to blog… but I’ve got the feeling, that this can be changed..

Summer was quite quiet in a conference-sense for me:

• I attended SQL Saturday Oslo 2019 (2019-08-31)and presented my “The Microsoft Power Platform – What is it?” session. It was my first trip to Norway and we took some days off around the conference and visited the Oslo area.. and we really, really liked it!
• In the following week, I had the chance be part of the presenter and organizing team of the “Global AI Night Vienna 2019“.  I enjoyed presenting the power of Azure Cognitive Services and show the possibilities of quickly implementing a powerful, AI-powered solution!

In a more organizer way, the summer was full of tasks…

• I was part of the program selection committee for the Power Platform WorldTour stop in Vienna. The conference is held on two days at the end of October –  so hurry up and register for two days full of sessions plus an optional pre-workshop day!
  If you are interested – Use the code 2019PPWT100VIENNA to save 100$!
• SQLSaturday Vienna 2020 is on it’s way.. we got more than 180!!! session proposals and we had endless discussions during the selection process… but stay tuned for the (I hope great) agenda!

In a writing way… well .. summer was full of work..

• but please stay tuned for a separate announcement post for that topic! 🙂

Autumn is getting a “little bit” busier

• Next week, SQLDays 2019 in Erding will be the first autumn conference stop. I will present a new session “Session Evaluation using PowerPlatform”
• SQLSaturday Munich 2019 is my next stop. Beautiful city, nice venue and even nicer people …. Join me for my “Hybrid Power BI” session!
• Next stop – Power Platform World Tour Vienna – I am joining the stage for two session – my introductory, demo-filled session “The Microsoft PowerPlatform – What is it?” and “Hybrid Power BI” (info).

In addition, until the end of the year, I will present and guide six Dashboard in a Day events in all over Austria.

If you are interested, hurry up and register for free! Places are filling up very quickly!
#cubidoOnTour it is!

Happy learning,

Wolfgang