The most important changes made for the May 2017 Power BI Desktop update
Part three of a seven-part series of blogs

The May 2017 Power BI Update brings in a couple of nice new query transforms and some new chart features, but the big changes are still in preview mode.

  1. Updates in the May 2017 Edition of Power BI Desktop
  2. Support for Different Types of URLs in Tables and Textboxes
  3. New Table and Matrix Visualisations in the Offing (this blog)
  4. Extracting Text Between Delimiters
  5. New Binning Options
  6. Data labels in combination charts
  7. Combining Files - Option to Choose First File

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few months, see this blog.

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 May 2017

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New Table and Matrix Visualisations in the Offing

Microsoft introduced a new preview matrix tool a few months ago, and have now followed this up with a new table tool:

Table and matrix

The new preview visualisations are shown boxed in red.

 

Note that (as the diagram above shows) you can still choose the established table and matrix tools.

I wouldn't normally blog about a feature still in preview, but while I was playing around with these two new tools something struck me as a major change.  Initially I wondered what the difference was:

Fields Settings
Field settings Format settings

I had a play, and everything seems pretty much the same.  But then I realised (I should have read the Microsoft blurb) that tables and matrices will be able to interact with other visualisations:

Table interaction

Want to see the make-up of a table or matrix entry? Highlight it!

Now that's worth looking forward to!

  1. Updates in the May 2017 Edition of Power BI Desktop
  2. Support for Different Types of URLs in Tables and Textboxes
  3. New Table and Matrix Visualisations in the Offing (this blog)
  4. Extracting Text Between Delimiters
  5. New Binning Options
  6. Data labels in combination charts
  7. Combining Files - Option to Choose First File
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