Power BI keeps on providing the updates that the community asks and has another packed and exciting update for July. There are great new enhancements to the Q&A functionality. Power BI also allows for gradient color legend support that helps clarify the meaning of the colors in a visual. The June release of the slicer update is further enhanced to customize the slicer header text. The relative time filter is also generally available. For the full summary of July’s update please visit the Power BI blog post here.
The Gradient Legend in reporting
You are now able to format the legend of a visual to be able to show the meaning of your report’s color gradient. This greatly enhances the readability of your visual as a user immediately understands what the color gradient represents.
To enable this on a visual, go to data colors and select fx. The following screen will appear.
Here you select your color scale and also which field to use for the color scale. What is really useful here is that you can use the summarization feature to select by which type of aggregation you would like the legend to be scaled by. Something to be aware of here is that you cannot conditionally format both the data colors and your legend field. The legend field will already format both the legend and your data in your visualization.
The gradient legend feature is enabled for bar, column, and scatter charts:
- Stacked bar chart
- Stacked column chart
- Clustered bar chart
- Clustered column chart
- 100% stacked bar chart
- 100% stacked column chart
- Scatter chart
Customize Hierarchical filtering header text
Last month saw the general availability of hierarchical filtering. Power BI have updated this feature so that you can update the Title’s text. In the initial release the slicer header text could not be updated and contained all the names of the fields used in the filter. This becomes quite illogical when a lot of fields are used.
This can now easily be updated with the relevant header of your own choice.
Q&A Additions
Power BI added four new features to the Q&A this month.
- Updates to Q&A pop-out
- New field synonyms
Q&A pop-out update
The pop-out on the Q&A visual contains any suggested questions you have defined in Q&A setup.
New field synonyms
The Q&A feature in Power BI is constantly being updated as it is still a relevant new feature. Now Q&A allows you to better manage manage which tables and fields to include and exclude from the Q&A feature. This is very useful when working with large datasets as it makes the Q&A more relevant and specific. Q&A also allow you to manage synonyms for fields in your datasets. This feature allows you to exclude suggested terms and to include your own synonyms. Now this is really useful. Companies often have their own ‘language’ for certain aspects of the business. It can become very frustrating when you are searching for a certain answer but cannot ind it as Q&A does not relate the internal name to the actual fields name. This will help model builders to add a lot of value when presenting to management.
Let’s take a closer look at this feature. Go to the setting wheel on the Q&A visual.
The below screen will open. Head over to the field synonyms tab. Here we see a lot of features that we can use to enhance the Q&A functionality. You can add new terms, see the suggested terms and exclude the suggested terms as well as decide which fields to include and exclude.
This is it for our short summary of some of the features that we feel is relevant for day to day users. Please head over to Power BI’s full overview of all the new functionality if you want to find out more about updates to custom visuals and the preview feature of launching external tools from Power BI Desktop.
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