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The April 2019 update to Power BI introduces a new concept: the ability to make the value of a property dynamic. Other welcome new changes include M Intellisense, data profiling in query editor and cross-report drill-down.
- The April 2019 Update to Power BI Desktop
- Conditional titles for visuals and conditional URLs
- Intellisense in the M Query Editor Language
- Data profiling in Query Editor
- Cross-report drill-through
- Fuzzy merging
- Power BI Dataflows
- Other changes in the April 2019 update
- Power BI features waiting in preview, as of April 2019 (this blog)
For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few years see this blog, or have a look at the Power BI courses that we run.
Posted by Andy Brown on 18 April 2019
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Power BI features waiting in preview, as of April 2019
There's been a bit of a purge of preview features this month, but the poor shape map visual remains while many of its more glamorous companions have left:

April 2019 preview features.
Here's my take on what to expect from each feature:
Feature | Notes | Rating | Months |
---|---|---|---|
Shape map visual | Will this ever see the light of day? | 4 | 15 |
Spanish language support for Q&A | Will Power BI show better answers when you put your question in Spanish? Time will tell - hasta luego. | 2 | 15 |
New web table inference | Power BI will provide support for scraping websites which don't have neatly formatted tables. | 7 | 1 |
Incremental Refresh Policies | For Power BI Premium only, to begin with, you'll be able to update only data which has changed. | 7 | 12 |
Manage aggregations | You will be able to load data at a summarised level into a data model (thus taking up far less space), while still allowing users to drill down to a lower level. | 6 | 8 |
New filter experience | A new customisable and easy-to-use filter pane, with filters that you can lock and hide (Microsoft keep announcing updates to this, but it remains in preview for now). | 9 | 6 |
Q&A Live Connect | This will allow you to ask questions against live connections to databases. | 2 | 5 |
Key influencers visual | A new visual showing the main factors influencing changes in a key metric (such as sales). | 7 | 3 |
Notes:
- The subjective Wise Owl rating goes from 1 (of little importance for most Power BI Desktop users) up to 10 (will have a huge impact on your everyday report designs).
- The final column shows the number of months that each feature has spent in preview since I started tracking it.
- The April 2019 Update to Power BI Desktop
- Conditional titles for visuals and conditional URLs
- Intellisense in the M Query Editor Language
- Data profiling in Query Editor
- Cross-report drill-through
- Fuzzy merging
- Power BI Dataflows
- Other changes in the April 2019 update
- Power BI features waiting in preview, as of April 2019 (this blog)