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New goodies in this month's update include the roll-out (sort of) of the new ribbon, new actions for buttons, multi-column sorting and a second axis for line charts.
- The March 2020 Power BI Desktop Update
- The new ribbon is live (sort of)
- Page navigation buttons
- Drill-through navigation buttons
- Multi-column sorting
- Searching in the filter pane
- Line charts can now have a dual axis
- The new DAX COALESCE function (this blog)
- Changes to ArcGIS
- Query Diagnostics
- Generating embed codes is now turned off by default
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 14 March 2020
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The new DAX COALESCE function
I'm going to struggle to enthuse about this, because DAX now has a function to mirror the SQL COALESCE function - and I never use that!
DAX function | SQL equivalent |
---|---|
ISBLANK | ISNULL |
COALESCE | COALESCE |
Here's the syntax of this function:

Keep trying different expressions until you find one which doesn't return blank.
I would normally include an example here, but I just can't think when you could possibly need this in a measure or calculated column!
- The March 2020 Power BI Desktop Update
- The new ribbon is live (sort of)
- Page navigation buttons
- Drill-through navigation buttons
- Multi-column sorting
- Searching in the filter pane
- Line charts can now have a dual axis
- The new DAX COALESCE function (this blog)
- Changes to ArcGIS
- Query Diagnostics
- Generating embed codes is now turned off by default