Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI
blog series. This week, we look at recent improvement in the Power BI
experience.
This month (July) saw several improvements to the Power BI experience
in Excel that will help many easily search data artifacts (including Power BI
datasets and Power BI datamarts) and uncover better data insights all inside a
spreadsheet environment. These
improvements are rolling out to users in phases and should have been completed
before you read this!
With these new changes to the Power BI experience in Excel, you may:
- more easily search for data in a new user-friendly interface
- discover new data artifacts with a deep link to the Power BI Data hub
where you can find recommended datasets and other trusted data in your organisation - derive additional insights from your data with direct links to Power BI
reports from inside Excel.
Power BI has become a common central data repository for many organisations
and now you can access all that data right inside Excel.
The new Power BI User Interface (UI) in Excel strives to be an
improvement from the prior interface. Now
it is easier for you to discover the right Power BI data for your analysis in
Excel. Also, it now shows the names of
the tables contained in a particular dataset so you may better understand your
data.
You can easily search for data using any of the following parameters:
- Dataset name
- Dataset Owner
- Workspace Name.
Any search will return an exact (or near exact match) for the
dataset(s) you are looking for. For
example, if the dataset you are looking for is owned by system administrator
and you search using that term, all datasets that you have access to that are
owned by system administrator will be returned.
The ‘Refreshed’ field shows you the exact timestamp for the day and
time when the data was last updated so you know you are working with the most
up-to-date data.
Furthermore, in the Power BI datasets pane in Excel, you can now
navigate to the Data hub in the Power BI Service where you can view all Power
BI datasets and other data artifacts you have access to. To navigate to the Power BI data hub from
Excel, select the ellipsis (…) beside the search bar in the Power BI datasets
pane and click ‘Datahub in Power BI’. A
new browser window will open that then takes you to the Power BI Service.
In the Power BI Data hub, you can discover recommended datasets based upon
the activity of people you work closely with and find datasets trusted in your
organisation. From any dataset in the
Power BI Data hub, you can create new reports, download the PBIX file or create
an ‘Analyze in Excel’ workbook in OneDrive to share with others.
Also, while you can connect directly to a Power BI dataset from Excel
and build connected reports in the spreadsheet using PivotTables, you may also
want to discover Power BI reports that use the same dataset either to get
additional insights or validate your analysis in Excel. Under the ‘Reports using this dataset’ item in
the pane, you can now see the Power BI reports that use a particular dataset.
Each of those reports are direct links to the Power BI Service and
clicking on any of the reports will open a new browser tab where you may view
the report.
Check back next week for more Power BI tips
and tricks!
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