 Hello and welcome to the Power BI Desktop February 2020 update. In this video, we do a rundown of what's included in this month's release, and we'll also have the product team demo some of the highlights. So let's get started. First, in the dataset management section, we're excited to announce that incremental refreshes are generally available, meaning it's no longer a premium-only feature, but now also supported in Power BI Pro. Now I'll hand it off to Christian for a demo of the feature. Hello everyone, this is Christian Wade, and I'm very happy to let you know that incremental refresh is now generally available, and backed by popular demand, it is now supported with Power BI Pro. Incremental refresh allows you to optimize your refreshes so that you don't need to refresh all of the historical data every time you do a refresh. This makes your refreshes much faster and much more reliable. What you can do is define an incremental refresh policy in Power BI Desktop to, for example, refresh the last five years when you first invoke a refresh after publishing the dataset for the first time, and subsequent refreshes will refresh only the last 10 days in this example. You can also use advanced features like detect data changes to refresh only the periods that actually have data that change, which again is much more efficient than refreshing the full dataset. Now, in conjunction with the large models feature, this allows you, or incremental refresh, allows you to unlock really large dataset. So this particular dataset is about 1.8 terabytes in its raw, uncompressed form. This is about 70 gigabytes in its compressed form, and this would be impossible to create without the incremental refresh feature in conjunction with large models. So here I have New York taxi rides across a 10-year period. Each row in the trip table represents an individual New York taxi ride. This trip count measure gives us the count of the rows in the table. Lo and behold, this is over three billion rows, and I can just create visuals very, very easily, very, very fast. Here I've got the top 10 pickup locations by zip code, and we can of course visualize this on a map as this is Power BI. So let's go ahead and create a nice little visual here, and there we go. And again, this would not be possible without the incremental refresh feature. Now, to set this up in Power BI Desktop, I can define the incremental refresh policy as we already discussed, and I also need to set up some Power Query parameters. So this is going to ensure that the data here in Power BI Desktop is nice and small, that I can upload it comfortably to the service, and when I invoke a refresh, it will then grow to many years' worth of data, right? So to go ahead and publish it to the service, so I can click on publish, and I can publish two workspaces that are not necessarily on Power BI Premium capacities anymore. It now works on Power BI Pro. Thank you very much. Moving on to our reporting section. Our first update in this section is the built-in slicer now supports hierarchies. Now, let's see a demo from Will. The hierarchy slicer is a visual that we've wanted to work on for some time, mostly because it was something that was coming from many, many customer requests. We had over 1,600 votes on our ideas forum, as you can see. There was actually a custom visual available that provided some of this capability, but we wanted to make sure it was available as a core visual as well so that you could use it out of the box, and it would work with all types and ranges of data that people are using within Power BI. So this feature you'll see is a preview feature, so you need to turn it on through the options dialog, but once you do so, any time you add a slicer to a page, you will find that you can now add multiple fields into that slicer. So if I was to do something like adding a class, just like it would act just like a regular slicer, but as soon as I add a second field like color name, you can see now that my slicer has these chevrons to let me expand and collapse to navigate up and down through this hierarchy. So I can build a hierarchy just by dragging any number of fields that I want to onto it, so I could even add product naming as well, and I can reorder them like I can do with fields in any visual to change the order in which they appear in the hierarchy. So if I expand out through economy, pick one of these colors, you'll see some of the specific products that are underneath there. And at this point, the selection model works just like any other slicer, so when I left click on one of these, it's gonna filter down the other visuals on my page to just that thing that I've selected. Just left clicking between them, toggles the item that I've got selected. I can hold down control and select the item as well, and that'll add things to the selection to show you multiple options. I can select items at different levels in the hierarchy as well, so this is now showing me all of the blue products, and if I expand that out, you'll see here's all those ones that are selected underneath. Control clicking in this case is gonna deselect items, so it's showing all blue products apart from these two AdventureWorks desk lamps. I can even make selections at different levels of the hierarchy, so I could say I wanna see all of the gold products and just these two green products. There's a number of formatting options that are available for the hierarchy slicer. So over in the formatting pane, as with the regular slicer, you'll see things like being able to turn on single select mode, which flips the slicer over into this kind of radio icon look and feel. I also wanted to point out that you can add fields from multiple tables. So for example, if I go to my product categories table, let's just go back to product name. I can bring in the product category and subcategory fields and drill down through a hierarchy across those different tables as well. There are some limitations on the types of relationships that you can use when you're working with fields across tables. For example, many to many relationships aren't supported. There's details and examples on what you can and can work with in the documentation. If your model includes hierarchies, for example, this date hierarchy, adding that to the slicer will automatically put it into the hierarchy mode so that you can expand and collapse through years, quarters, months in the individual days. If you'd rather have the date range picker, just selecting the date field itself and dragging that onto the field well, we'll put it into the mode where you can drag to select a date range or use the built-in date picker. If you want to swap it over, just add the date hierarchy and remove the date field and you'll get the hierarchy nature instead. You can also swap between a list and a drop-down slicer, the different sort of modes that you'd expect from the existing slicer. You can do that here too. We also have some updates to the new ribbon, which is in preview. These updates include the new look for the title bar, new key tips functionality, the ability to set custom format strings from the ribbon, and finally, the title bar, ribbon, and file menu are now fully keyboard accessible. We have Tessa here today who will show you a demo of the updates. So first we want to thank you guys all for giving us a lot of feedback on the ribbon. It's been really helpful to hear what has and hasn't been working for you and it really helps influence the direction we take in the product. With our updates to the ribbon and the title bar, the first thing you may have noticed is that we have a new look for the title bar. You see that there's this dark background. The second thing that you may have noticed is that we have added some controls to the top left of the title bar. So this is more closely aligned with Office and we heard some feedback from you guys that you wanted the save undo and redo button to be put back in the title bar. So we did that for you guys and hopefully this makes these actions a lot quicker for you to get access to and they're in a place that is familiar to you. On the right side of the title bar, we also have the side in control. So that aligns a little bit more with Office and this adds to the cohesive look. The next update is that we now have key tip generality in Power BI's ribbon. So in Office you might be familiar with the idea that you can use your keyboard to navigate around the ribbon and we've added that in to help with accessibility. So if I press Alt in Windows, then we'll see that these keyboard or key tips show up. If I wanna navigate to a different tab in the ribbon, I can press the letter that's associated with the tab that I'm interested in. So if I'm interested in moving to the insert button, I can press the I key and once I move there, then I see the sub buttons that are available and the key tips that are associated with them. If I wanna continue and execute on that specific control, then I can just continue to press my key tips and let's say I wanna add a new visual, I would press NB and a new visual would show up. Every time you want those key tips to show up, you just press Alt in Windows. And if I've navigated to a different tab, so if I navigate to the modeling tab, I can press M and I decide I actually want to move out of this layer of key tips, then I can press Escape and that'll move me back out to the tabs in the ribbon. Beyond key tips, the ribbon is now fully accessible. You can navigate around the title bar ribbon and file menu using keyboard and accessibility tools. So if I want to move around the ribbon, I can press Tab and in between the different tabs, I can use arrow keys to navigate between the tabs in the ribbon. Now let's say I want to go into a subsection of the tabs, then I can press Tab and continue to use my arrow keys to move around these items in my ribbon as well. You may remember from before that the only way that you could set custom format strings was to go to the modeling tab or modeling view in Power BI Desktop and then go to your properties pane and make sure that you have this format section selected on the custom area. Now you can set custom format strings in the ribbon and by doing that, I can just click on whatever column or measure that I'm interested in and I can click in this format combo box here and if I just paste in the custom format string that I'm interested in, then we'll see now that my field here has been formatted to this new value that I want it to be displayed as. Now in the context of this, since I have a month number and I'm using a currency type format, it might not necessarily make sense in this context but the idea is that you can now change your custom format string in the ribbon as well. And if I go back to the modeling view here and you see that I've set this custom format string for my account of product, if I've set this custom format string previously in the properties pane, I can still see that propagated through to the ribbon. So if I go back to my report view and I click on my account of product, then you'll see that custom format string is also displayed in the combo box in the ribbon as well. Next in our modeling section, we have a few updates. We've added two new DAX functions, first non-blank value and last non-blank value. These new functions will return the first or last measure value that is not blank. To further illustrate these new functions, let's see an example from Sujatha. To demonstrate these two new DAX functions, I'll be using a really simple data set that's based on a order date and has a sum of units for that order date. So the sum of units column will actually have a few blank values to help illustrate this example. So let's say if I'm using the first non-blank value function, you'll notice that there is a similar DAX function called first non-blank and I'll go ahead and explain the difference between the two. So both of these functions take in the exact same parameters, which is a column and then an expression. So we'll switch to first non-blank column here and expression. However, they're gonna evaluate to different results. So let me show you real quick by using a card. So I'm gonna drag in first non-blank here and then let me take another card and then I'm gonna drag in first non-blank value. So you'll notice that basically first non-blank returns not the measure value, but the value of the column that you entered, whereas first non-blank value is gonna actually compute the value rather than return the value from the column. And this difference is the exact same for last non-blank, except instead of looking at the first one, it's gonna go ahead and look at the last value instead of the last column value. Now moving on to our visualization section. We have several new custom visuals now available on AppSource. And we have a couple of updates to existing visuals. First by Xviz, we have Funnel and Pyramid chart. Then we have OEE dashboard by three AG systems. Next we have Organization chart by MAQ software. The last new visual this month is the PI viz pack by PQ systems, which includes histogram, individuals control chart, individuals and moving range control chart, multi group individuals chart, X bar control chart, X bar and range control chart, P chart and U chart. We have one more update in this section. In December, we announced the new Zebra BI tables and charts custom visuals. Recently, they just announced several new updates to those visuals. So be sure to update to the latest version to take advantage of the new improvements. If you want to learn more about any of these custom visuals and updates, be sure to check down in the description for the download links, as well as links to video demos for these visuals. Next we have a few new template apps. If you're new to template apps, they're an easy way to build custom apps by starting from pre-built data sets and reports that were carefully curated by our partners. This month's template apps are Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics, NFL Analytics, Acteras for QuickBooks, Zero and Workflow Max. Be sure to check down in the description if you're interested in trying any of these template apps. Next we have an update in our data preparation section. Last October, we released the query diagnostics feature in preview. And with that initial release, some users of the Microsoft Store version were unable to run diagnostics if they didn't have admin rights. Now this month for those users, we've added non-admin support for query diagnostics when using the query editor. Finally, in our data connectivity section, we have several updates. We have a couple of connectors that are now generally available. Microstrategy connector and FHIR connector are now generally available. We also have several brand new connectors, which include the fact set connector, Tibco connector, Jamf Pro connector, Asana connector. That's it for this month. We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements. Please keep sending us feedback and let us know which features you'd like to see in upcoming releases. Also, if you'd like to interact and network with the Power BI team and other Power BI creators, we encourage you to register for the Microsoft Business Application Summit in May. Thanks for watching and we'll see you again next month. Our topic today is storytelling with data. The nice thing about data is, yes, you know Power BI, yes, you can build a data model, yes, you can connect your data model and write DAX. At the end of the day, what people see is your visual and your visual may look very nice at first, but if it doesn't answer a question or doesn't help people solve a problem, then it's not really an effective visual. So an effective visual is that which is very attractive, but solves a problem. So it solves a problem directly. So one looks at your visual and says, hey, excellent. I understand exactly what it is we need to do just by looking at your visual. So David and I are going to go through some of the visuals, pick some and kind of talk to you about it and see why does this visual look good? Or why does this visual work? Or why doesn't it work? All right, so we have a couple of visuals we've listed out and see whether or not the visual tells a story because in building all of us is storytelling. We love storytelling. And if you can use data to tell stories, man, it's really, really attractive. So let's jump in. One of the, to me, the number one visual, actually I think the number one visual in Power BI is an AI visual called the Key Influencer Visual. Well, one of the good things about SkinFluencer's visual is that it helps you understand what actually is making your value, any value that you're working with to increase or decrease majorly. So if you're looking at something and you're bringing in so many of your categories, now we call categories something like dimension files when we train and we say, oh, okay, some of these things. So we are bringing in less location. What is affecting? Why is this sales up by products or by tables? Why is it all by tables? We are seeing like 432.7 when it increases by chairs, by technology. What Key Influencer is trying to do is to give you the key products that is making your sales to increase. With a chart, you can actually see a bar chart that technology is increasing very high above 400, close to 500. And you can see sales is more likely to increase when category is technology than otherwise on average, which means that Power BI gives you the opportunity to use AI visuals to explain in simplest form why your sales is going high. Also, you can look at your decrease also. You can see why your sales is decreasing. So you know that office supplies. So now as a business person, you can now say, oh, office supply, what is wrong? Why is office supply the lowest? So you need to start action questions. And that's one of the things we use Key Influencers for. So help you understand your business. What is not bringing in sales? What is bringing in sales? If it's not bringing in sales, what can we do to make it increase? If it's not bringing in sales, what can we do to make it increase? If it's bringing in sales, what can we do to make it more increase and get better at what we do? So that is what Key Influencers does. Yeah, so Key Influencer, for those statisticians in the house, it's doing like a regression, a detailed regression. Every single thing you click is doing a regression. So it's doing that really, like for example, look at this. So office supplies is really the one that has the most potential to decrease sales by a certain amount. There's also top segments up here. You can click on top segment. It kind of further breaks down the whole data into segments. So you say we found five segments and ranked them by average of sales and population size. Select a segment to see more details. So I select this segment. What's it talking about this segment? It's okay, it's broken down into office supplies. Ship mode is not second class. Subcategory is not storage. So all of these things are our dimensions. And they're saying, okay, these are the segments. It's broken down by categories, not storage. Subcategory is not art and it's not paper, it's not binder. And then you look at the segments. How based on that segment that it has kind of categorized, what are the key influences there? Spend some time, right guys? Spend some time understanding this key influencer visual. It's easy to build, but it's good that you understand how you can use it to explain something. So you see analyze and then see explain by to the right here, right? So that's a visual that I think really, really good. It's kind of number one on my list actually. And it's an AI visual. Another visual to look at it is coming up. Looks very, very strange. So that visual is actually called the impact bubble chart. Impact bubble chart, what's that? So this is another visual. So this is like a 10 of a mini dashboard, right? It looks fancy and stuff. But really when it comes to storytelling, we should be able to tell a story. Now, if you look at this, this is again over time, over time you're telling a story over time, just a little bit like the previous visual. But this time it is charts that are moving and they're moving quite fast. Don't know if you can pause them. Go to your formatting tab and then we click on the settings and we pause. So the duration, well, we need to remove autoplay so it doesn't autoplay, right? So this, hello, everybody can hear me. So this visual is called the animated bar chart erase. Erase now, this bar is basically saying, okay, over time, let's see how we've done. And this is such an excellent thing to do. You could put your various products and then say, okay, how have they done over time? And I have fictitious data here. So it's unrealistic that things will be changing this much. They won't really be changing that much with you, but you can see it growing over time. And then so one nice visual you will do, which we've done, I think in our live meetup, we do live meetups every Thursday of the month where you have China, US, you see China over the last 20 years, maybe at number 20, then moving to number 18, moving to number 15, 12, 10, eight, nine, eight, seven, six, five, and now two and then one. So China is moving and this chart will show it very clearly. You see China, 1985 here and then China 1990 is moving up. So this telling stories, right? It's about time. There's no, nothing about story that you can tell that is one point in time. Just one tiny point in time. Yes, it's a story, but really certain stories kind of transit is about time. So this will happen like yesterday and then today this will happen. It's a story, right? So storytelling is very, very important. Here's your key influencer visual we used here. This is the other bubble chart, but this is a different kind of bubble chart that this one is not like the one we used where we called it the impact bubble chart. This is just a typical bubble chart but still showing you over time how things have changed. So a lot of these visuals that are really good are the ones that allow you to play over time. Then you can see a visual up here and let me ask David A to kind of talk about this one here which is like a card visual. Okay, so this is matrix visual. So if I click, so now what it does is it shows you two different things that you might want to see, multiple card. So now if you have, let's say you want to see the price of the phone or let's say accessories or products and also the value attached to it, yeah, it's cool. But what I did here for us is for us to see the top five visuals in the whole sales. So we're looking at the top five. So if David B, if you click on let's say slice the region by let's say North East, you will notice just be looking at your multi-roll card. Your multi-roll card will roll. They will give you all the prices that has been made in that period of time. So now we are looking at just the top five, the top three, the top two, that is how you do it. So somebody might want to ask that, okay, how do we do it? So we use the filter bar, that is what we used to do it. So the filter bar, so we look at the filter, you put in the top end. Yes, when you click there, you use that region. So you go to two different states there and that is where you click and you put in the numbers and things that you need to do. So that's just how it works. So if you notice, our notice is now showing machine as the one leading, as the one leading. So the phone, before phone was leading in south-south, but now it not is actually machine that are leading. So there is a different ways. Can you see the top end? Now that top end, when you click on the top end, beside you just to show item, you see top. If you click on that top, you will be seeing top and bottom. So if you want to see a top three, top four, top five, top two, you're going to see it, you're going to see it and that is how it's going to work. So that is how it works. And you just put in the value, either you're putting in the sum, you're putting in transaction account. It looks at that and that is how it works. So in our business, we really want to know the two, three top selling, product that we are selling, or in the bank, you want to look at the two top of 10 top sales guys in the office. How do we do that? We use that filter, we do the top end at the bottom or bottom 10, and that is how it works. Bottom, what do you want to use? You want to see your bottom so that you can understand the things in your business that you need to really focus on. What is the type of branch that's not really making sales in a month or in a year? This is how you begin to look at it and your data goes in there and bring out all those data for you without really stressing yourself. Great, so the filter pane, so this filter pane is a very good way to kind of manage your reports and not write complex docs because sometimes to be able to do this before you had to write really, really complex docs and frankly, click, click, click is the best way. One thing about Power BI that is moving. Power BI, as the updates come along, you see that it's trying to be looking like office as much as possible, like PowerPoint, Power Excel and so because billions of people worldwide are using Office, there isn't Word, there isn't Excel, there isn't PowerPoint. So if they can make Power BI look as close to that as possible and the short cost even as close to that as possible, then people will be more comfortable using Power BI. That's the whole idea, right? And gradually they're moving the UI to that and making things much, much easier. You can do formatting from the main UI and stuff. It's a line chart, that's the last one. So yeah, so line chart is like a time in memorial, everybody knows line chart and line chart is really meant for showing is it the x-axis or y I always forget? Yeah, exactly. So this is the x-axis and it also has to have time on the x-axis and then whatever values or measures you have on the y-axis and then this tells me what's happening over time. So I can hover over that and in fact you can even put some, if I click on this visual, right? I click on this visual, I can even add some context to it and say tooltips. So tooltips, I can decide, I'm gonna add some more things under tooltips so it could give me some more information when I hover over any part of the line. So I can say, okay, I need to know what country I'm in and then I can know, okay, maybe what category I can bring in some categories in here into my tooltip. Let me say region, right? Maybe region, I can take region and drop it into my tooltip. So I'm dragging it there. So you can see I'm putting stuff into my tooltip and by putting stuff into my tooltip and I go and hover over a line, let's say I click on this line, for example, then you will see that the tooltip adds some more context, right? What else can you say about the line chart? David A. Okay, so one of the cool things about the line chart is the analytics in the line chart. A lot of people really don't know that there is actually another AI tool in line charts, actually. So now if you click on, let's say just click on one of the top, yes, click on the top and right click it. So if you should right click it, you will see, okay, now do you now see analyze? So now imagine you're having a business, just look at what we're doing, our key influencers visual, are you seeing why your sales is going up or why your sales is decreasing, increase? So now if you click on explain, increase. Now see what line charts we do, line charts will go to all your charts, all your data and begin to look at it. So you're gonna run analysis, run analysis on it and when you rank the results, look at everything, they're gonna give you visualizations and explanation of why after that period of time, your sales was that high. So if you can look at also, you can see ranking results, bring in a result, then now you're gonna begin to see your visualizations now. So now can you see sales revenue by quantity and week number annual? So you're gonna be looking at it, so now you can see your visuals. Now why is going that up after that period of time? So this is how, and it has different visual that you can use. Whereby when you need, oh okay, maybe this visual is okay for my explanation or maybe this visual is okay for me. So you just pick the visual that you need and you begin to explain that why after that period of time, your sales was high. Your sales was high. You can also go down to maybe a point in your line chart where your sales is low and you can still do the same analysis. So you can, if you go down, so you're gonna be seeing different analytics, different, now can you go up a little bit? Now let's look at this, it'll go up a little bit. I want to look at this analysis chart. Now you can see this, sales revenue by quantity and customer name. Now it's giving us the three names in your data that has the largest increase among customer name. Now offsetting the decrease of remote bush. Now, can you see what line chart can do? So it's not because of only because it's just our traditional line chart. So much power has been given by Power BI to make sure that line chart has the capability to go into your data and begin to do crazy and good things with your data. I won't call it crazy, but it's crazy when you think about how you want to do it manually. If you want to do this thing manually, forget it. This is telling you that these three customers had the largest increase among customer name, which is among customer name. Again, that customer name you can change it to among our customers. You can change the English and the grammar internally, right? Offsetting the decrease in remote bush. So remote bush maybe is a customer who had a decrease, but these three other customers offset that decrease. Do you get? And the offset is enough for it to grow. So it's amazing what you can do with Power BI and the visuals. But the most important thing for you guys is try and understand that you need to tell stories. How do I tell an excellent story with Power BI and then use all these wonderful visuals and custom visuals to tell wonderful stories in Power BI? So thank you very much David A for talking to us today. Thank you very much. I hope you've learned something. Yes, and I guess I definitely did. And guys, we'll see you again next month on our monthly webinars on our Excel and Power BI webinar series. We're going to also be doing Power Apps webinars. We're going to do Power Automate webinars or Power Virtual Agents. So we're doing the entire Power Platform webinars and we're not leaving our good old friend Excel. So we're still going to have some Excel stuff as well. We didn't have any Excel stuff today, but next time we'll probably have one or two Excel because Excel is also doing some wonderful, wonderful stuff. So thanks everybody for joining us and we'll see you again Thursday of the month. Please register, tell your friends and everything to join us on Thursday of the month. We will re-record this and publish it on our YouTube channel. You can check YouTube, dbrown consulting and also we also do financial modeling webinars for those wanting to join us. We're going to talk about debt again. We're going to do that in the next hour. Thank you very much everybody and bye bye.