A summary of the new features introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
Part three of an eight-part series of blogs

The September update of Power BI finally breathes life into report page tooltips, which have been in limbo for a while. You can also copy data from Power BI reports by right-clicking, use some keyboard short-cuts for visual design, apply built-in themes, set fixed-width padding by column example and show categories on the X axis of scatter charts.

  1. Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
  2. Report page tooltips
  3. Copying values and records (this blog)
  4. Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop
  5. Built-in themes
  6. Column From Examples now allows for text padding
  7. Improvements to dot (scatter) charts
  8. Features awaiting in preview as of September 2018

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog, or have a look at the Power BI courses that we run.

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 September 2018

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Copying values and records

This is a simple change, but a very useful one!  You can now copy data from a visual, either by value:

Copying value

This would copy the single value 89422.50000000028 (with an unnecessary and inaccurate degree of precision).

Or by selection:

Copying by selection

For this example you'd get a table consisting of the column headers (not shown in the screen shot) and the East Anglia row of data.

Here's another example, this time with a column selected:

Copying a column

Here we have a column of a matrix selected.

This is what the above would give if copied into Excel:

Data copied to Excel

Data is copied with its formatting.

 

Microsoft are planning to enhance this feature in future releases of Power BI, but even now it provides a great way to check figures in Excel.

  1. Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
  2. Report page tooltips
  3. Copying values and records (this blog)
  4. Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop
  5. Built-in themes
  6. Column From Examples now allows for text padding
  7. Improvements to dot (scatter) charts
  8. Features awaiting in preview as of September 2018
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