Fabric Apps for Semantic Models
To kick off this blog on the right foot, I’ll start with a major new addition to the Fabric platform: Fabric Apps! This preview feature lets you build apps based on your semantic models, powered by AI. With these apps, you can integrate your data with business processes. This significantly shortens the path from reporting data to taking action. For example, you could create an app that a sales team uses to identify opportunities in a data-driven way and follow up on them immediately. This app could, for instance, consist of a dashboard displaying various KPIs related to the sales pipeline, a calendar providing an overview of interactions with your customers, and—for each customer—an overview of not only their sales history but also a prediction of the likelihood of a sale based on sentiment analysis of email correspondence. The best customers can be contacted directly from within the app.
This streamlines the process significantly, since a sales team no longer has to use different tools along the path from insight to action. Again, this is a preview feature. It may still be too early to fully commit to Fabric Apps, though it can certainly be interesting to explore them and build your first app. Just keep in mind that certain features may not yet work exactly as they will in the final general availability (GA) version.
Visual Calculations and Custom Totals Are Now Generally Available
For those who have had to wait for new updates to become generally available because preview features aren't allowed, the wait is finally over: this quarter, a number of updates have been made available for general use. These include Visual Calculations and, along with them, the corresponding Custom Totals.
When you create a report, you naturally want to fill it with as many interesting insights from the data as possible. These insights often go beyond just a total or an average, so they require a more complex formula. However, you don’t always want a new DAX measure to be created for every formula, which can clutter up your model. For example, if you have formulas that are each used only within a single visual and cannot or should not be reused elsewhere. That is precisely one of the reasons why Visual Calculations were introduced. You can then create a formula within the scope of a visual that doesn’t unnecessarily expand your model. This calculation then computes your formula based on the context within that visual. This is also what sets a Visual Calculation apart from a regular DAX measure. This makes it very easy, for example, to calculate the difference from the previous row, which is much more difficult with a regular measure. So now you can also immediately add a Custom Total if your formula differs at the total level compared to the row level. A special “dialect” of DAX has also been created for these Visual Calculations, in which, among other things, a few functions have been replaced by others.
Organizational apps with target audiences and mobile apps
The Org apps now also have G.A. status, including the ability to create audiences for each app, save bookmarks, and access the Org apps via the Power BI mobile app.
Org apps are similar to the (longer-established) workspace apps. Like workspace apps, Org apps are a way to bundle reports and dashboards and present them to end users. For both, you can only add items to the app from the workspace in which that app is located. Both types can display different items for different audiences. The difference is that you can create multiple Org apps per workspace instead of just a single app per workspace. In addition, access and security are handled differently, and updates to a report are applied immediately in an Org app, whereas a workspace app only displays report updates once you update the app. So there are certainly some subtle differences to keep in mind if you’re deciding between a workspace app and an Org app.
The Org apps have also been added directly to the Fabric REST APIs. This allows you to manage and update your Org apps via this API. That can make a difference if you want to automate or speed up certain processes.
Power BI formatting options
New features are regularly added that let you customize or format your Power BI reports to your liking. A number of changes were made this quarter, and I’ve selected three of them.
First up is a new setting for slicers that makes it easier to select dates. Under the slicer settings, you can now choose a ‘Date Picker’—that is, if you enable this preview feature in the settings. Once you’ve selected this option, you can choose dates in a slicer using a calendar-like interface, which is a much more intuitive way to select dates than the old options currently available by default.
Second, you can choose to avoid having extra white space above the tallest bar and the top of the chart area in a bar chart by turning off the new ‘Round range’ option. This aligns the highest value with the height of the y-axis. This can be especially useful if your column chart is fairly small and you need to make the most of the available space.
Finally, you now have more control over the column widths in tables and matrices. You may already be familiar with the options that let Power BI automatically set column widths and the (relatively) new feature that allows you to always use the full width of the visual. Starting this quarter, you have even more options for setting column widths without having to manually drag each column to make it wider or narrower. For example, you can set a column to always be a specific number of pixels wide, or define a conditional formatting rule for each column to determine its formatting.
Conclusion
These are certainly not the only updates from this quarter, but they are some of the most notable ones. This is just a selection from a list of interesting and useful changes in Fabric. I’m curious to hear your thoughts and find out which update from this quarter is your favorite!
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