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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.
- Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
- Report page tooltips
- Copying values and records (this blog)
- Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop
- Built-in themes
- Column From Examples now allows for text padding
- Improvements to dot (scatter) charts
- 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:

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

Here we have a column of a matrix selected.
This is what the above would give if copied into 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.
- Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
- Report page tooltips
- Copying values and records (this blog)
- Keyboard short-cuts in Power BI Desktop
- Built-in themes
- Column From Examples now allows for text padding
- Improvements to dot (scatter) charts
- Features awaiting in preview as of September 2018