Last night at approximately 9:28 PM EST the June 2016 release of Power BI Desktop dropped, which you can download here. The June update is pretty extensive and includes a bunch of new features and improvements. Here’s some of the biggest new features and some of my favorites.
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Row Level Security is now in Power BI Desktop
This is the big one. This update is huge because now we can build our role based security model right into the Power BI Desktop instead of having to manage the security in the Power BI service.
The management of the roles can be accessed from the Modeling ribbon within Power BI Desktop.
To create a new role, click Manage Roles. From here you can create your roles and specify the DAX used to filter which rows are accessible by the members of the role.
Give your role a meaningful name, click the ellipses next to the table that has the field you want to filter on. Then select Add filter and select the field you want to use. This will produce a little template of a DAX expression that you just need to update with the value you want to filter on.
To test your role, click the View As Roles button in the Modeling ribbon and select the role you want to test.
Now that’s just the first piece of the role based security. To actually add members to the role, we need to publish the Power BI Desktop file to the Power BI site.
Once you publish your Power BI Desktop file, go to the Dataset in the Power BI site, click the ellipses and select Security.
Then just add the members to your roles.
Configurable Line Chart Data Labels
This is just a little enhancement but one that will make my customers’ lives easier. Adding data labels to a line chart was always hit or miss if there were many data points on the line chart. But in the latest release of Power BI Desktop, we now have some configuration options on how data labels are displayed on a line chart.
Notice on the right in the formatting options for the line chart we can now customize the color of the data labels, value formatting, font size, and label density. The label density property is the setting I’m most excited about. This really adds another level of usability to the line chart because now we can actually display the data labels without jumbling the labels together on the line chart.
Searchable Slicers
Searchable slicers are also a new feature in the latest release of Power BI Desktop. A couple days ago I wrote about some of my favorite custom visuals, which included the Smart Filter by SQLBI. I think I still prefer the Smart Filter in many situations, but the search-ability of the native Slicer is definitely a nice feature to have right out of the box.
To turn on the search box for the Slicer, click the ellipses in the top right of the Slicer and click Search. You can turn off the search box the same way.
Resources
Download the latest version of Power BI Desktop: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/
Read about all the features included in the latest release of Power BI Desktop: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-june-update/
Feedback?
What do you think about the new features? Leave a comment down below and let me know. And of course, if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment!