A summary of the new features introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update
Part one 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 (this blog)
  2. Report page tooltips
  3. Copying values and records
  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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Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update

For me, this update is dominated by the roll-out of report page tooltips, which have been in preview now for a few months, but there are a few other nice changes too.

Microsoft also seemed to have solved a bug, whereby when you started typing in the text for a visual's Title property the cursor lost focus.

Here are the changes for this month which we think will impact our clients (you can see the full list here):

Change Notes
Report page tooltips You can show the contents of a separate tooltip page when you linger over an item in a report.
Copying data You can now right-click to copy an individual value, or selected rows, columns or cells.
Keyboard short-cuts To improve accessibility Microsoft have provided some short-cut keys when designing reports
Built-in themes There are now 7 built-in themes that you can apply to any report.
Text padding You can now automatically apply fixed-length text padding using Columns From Example.
Dot chart improvements You can now specify a category field to be the X axis for adot (scatter) chart.

I've also included a separate list of the features waiting in preview.

  1. Changes introduced in the September 2018 Power BI update (this blog)
  2. Report page tooltips
  3. Copying values and records
  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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