Friday, July 10, 2015

Power BI Release Date! #PowerBI

Microsoft has announced this morning the General Availability date for the new Power BI as July 24th! I had a feeling the announcement was coming after the stability of the last couple of monthly updates was so good and that Power BI Designer did not get it's normal monthly update in June.

Power BI Designer is going to be renamed to Power BI Desktop and they have opened up a GitHub project to open source some of the visualizations and allow for more to be developed by the community! Looks like support for Excel is going to work through Excel Online for now, not sure what this means for the existing Excel add-ons. Also for those of you that missed it the Android Power BI app is also now available!

With this GA release it will finally move out of preview and I assume they will start to charge for the Pro level. Looking forward to this moving out of beta and seeing how everyone starts to use it!

Sunday, July 5, 2015

24 Hours of PASS: Growing Our Community Recordings #pass24hop

All of the recordings for 24 Hours of PASS: Growing Our Community sessions are now available! I was honored to be selected for this event and you can get to the slides and recording for my "Introduction to the Power BI Designer" session using this link. Thanks to the team at PASS for going a great job editing out the technical difficulties that happened in this session, I had to look at it a couple of times to find the break, so they did a great job fixing that.

There were many good questions that I answered most of them at the end of the session, but there was one that I didn't know the answer to at the time, which was what version of the SAP Business Objects Universe does Power BI Designer/Power BI work with. I found this support article that lists SAP Business Objects BI 4.1 SP2 or higher as the version that the current Power Query for Excel supports, which I would assume is the same for the Power BI Designer and PowerBI.com. I also found this blog post along with this video on YouTube that demos this connectivity with the existing Power Query for Excel.

That was the only unanswered question that I know about from the session, if any of you have other questions after watching the session, please feel free to send me an email or just post it in the comments below.

Thanks again and I hope to see you at the PASS Summit 2015 in Seattle on 10/27 - 10/30. Don't forget to use the discount code LC15WTG2 when you register to save $150 off the current price!

Oh and one more thing for tonight's Women's World Cup final, GO USA! :)