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This month's big story is a huge range of improvements to the Q&A feature in Power BI, with more in the preview pipeline. There are also a built-in PowerApps visual, improvements to data profiling in Query Editor and a new template for connecting to datasets.
- Updates to Power BI for October 2019
- The new Q+A visual, and many other Q+A changes
- The PowerApps visual is now part of Power BI
- Data profiling enhancements in Query Editor (this blog)
- PBIDS files to create data access templates
- Features in Power BI preview as at October 2019
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 20 October 2019
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Data profiling enhancements in Query Editor
The main benefit of these enhancements is that they provide a very easy way to omit certain values when you load data into a model - read on to see what I mean!
Column profiling and grouping
As a reminder, you'll need to make sure that you have column profiling turned on in Query Editor to see any of the features shown on this page:
Make sure you've ticked the option shown below for a table in Query Editor.
You can then choose to group data by following the numbered steps below:
(1) Click on the column, then (2) click on the ... symbol shown and finally (3) choose what you want to group by.
The choice of what you can group by depends on the type of data being charted:
| Type of data | Grouping options |
|---|---|
| Text | Length of each text entry |
| Numeric | Whether positive or negative, or whether odd or even |
| Date | Year, month, day, week of year or day of week |
Excluding data
Once you've chosen to group the data, you can easily exclude a particular column:
If you don't want to include data for Sundays, just group a date column by the day of the week, then right click on the Sunday column to exclude its data.
Power BI adds an additional step to your transforms for the table:
The M language logic applied (for anyone who is interested!) is Table.SelectRows(#"Changed Type", each Date.DayOfWeek([PurchaseDate]) <> 0).
- Updates to Power BI for October 2019
- The new Q+A visual, and many other Q+A changes
- The PowerApps visual is now part of Power BI
- Data profiling enhancements in Query Editor (this blog)
- PBIDS files to create data access templates
- Features in Power BI preview as at October 2019