Fabric Monthly Update - March 2024

SAVEEN REDDY: Hello, Fabric Community. This is the March edition for the Fabric monthly update. I am Saveen Reddy, Director of Community and Learning for Microsoft Fabric. Remember I'm covering just the highlights in this video. For all the details, check out the update blog, the link is in the video description. Now let's get started. You can now add and edit visual calculations on the service. To add, just select new calculation from the context menu on a visual after you publish a report. If

you have a report that you already published that has visual calculations, then you can get to the visual calculations edit mode just by selecting a visual calculation and then choosing edit calculation for on object interaction. We've streamlined the build pane and we've moved the visual suggestions feature to be inside the on object build button. If you need help building your visual, use the on-object suggest a visual experience and if you already know your way around, then just use the build

pane as you do already today. To view data in Power BI mobile apps, you really want to have report layouts that are optimized for mobile scenarios. Until now, it has required extra work to create those mobile optimized layouts. But starting this month with a click of a button, you can automatically generate those mobile optimized layouts. This is going to save you a lot of time. SPEAKER 1: Why not both? To balance the needs of our existing users who prefer to build visuals quickly in the pane w

ith the needs of our new users that need guidance when picking a visual type or appropriate field wells, you no longer have to choose one or the other path. Now there's both. This month we streamline the build pane and move the visual suggestions feature to be inside the on object build button only. This simplifies the build pane and gives back some of the height from before to be able to see more field wells. This also makes it more clear when to use what, need help building your visual, use th

e on-object to suggestive visual experience. Already know your way around. Use the build pane as you already do today. Depending on where you prefer to start building your visual, the on-object menu will be opened or closed. If you typically start your visual by first choosing a type from the build pane and dragging fields to the wells then the on-object menu will remain closed to not get in your way. But if you start from the data pane, the canvas or the ribbon on object will be open to assist

you with suggesting a visual type and placing the fields for you in the appropriate wells. This is especially helpful if you're using the switch mode on the panes where the build pane may actually be collapsed. The on-object build menu is still available. We've also made updates to the pain switcher. The pain switcher has now been renamed to the pain manager and spruced up this month based on your feedback. We've updated the order of the pain listings. Notice build is now second in the list. We

added the settings that pertain to the pain manager directly in this menu. These can still be found in the settings menu using the gear button at the bottom. But for ease of access, we've added these options here as well. Show only one active pain is off by default to make use of the stacking pain behavior. You can always turn this on if you want the switch behavior instead. Last but not least, gauge visual is now supported. The gauge visual now supports the new on-object formatting sub selectio

ns. Simply double click on your "Gauge visual" to enter format mode and then right click on which part of the visual you'd like to format using the mini toolbar. SPEAKER 2: Hello, everyone. Today I'm going to show you the new Auto Create feature for mobile optimized layout. With this new feature, you can now generate a mobile optimized layout with just a click of a button, saving you tons of time. Let's see how it works. Here is a desk to layout of a report. As you can see, this layout includes

page navigator, slicers, overlaid visuals and visuals with different visibility state that can be hidden and shown using the bookmark button. Now let's switch to the mobile layout. If the mobile canvas is empty, you can generate a mobile layout just by selecting the auto Create button. As you can see, I now have a mobile layout generated from the desk playout. The auto create engine understand the desk layout of your report, and build a mobile layout that consider the position, size, type, and o

rder of the visuals that the report contains. As you can see, it also takes into account the overlaid visuals and the hidden visuals. The bookmark buttons works the same way we saw in the desk playout in the mobile layout as well. If the mobile canvas already includes visuals in the mobile layout, you can use the Auto create button that will remove all the current visuals and create a new mobile layout based on the auto create logic. You can use the undo option to return to the previous layout i

f you want. You can also edit the automatically created mobile layout. If the result is not exactly what you expected, you can tweak it to make it perfect for your needs. Think of it as a starting point you can use to shorten the way to that beautiful, effective mobile optimized report you envision. To start enjoying the new mobile layout auto create capabilities, switch on the Auto create Mobile Layout Preview feature in Power BI Desktop. We invite you to try it out and share your feedback with

us. Thank you. SAVEEN REDDY: DAX query view with Copilot is now available in public preview. Once you enable this feature, you can use Fabric Copilot to generate DAX queries from natural language and get explanations of DAX queries and functions and even get help on specific DAX topics. The enhanced row level security editor is now the default experience in Power BI Desktop. With this editor, you can quickly and easily define row level security roles and filters. You can do this without having

to write any DAX. This month we are previewing selection expressions for calculation groups. This allows you to influence what happens in the case where a user makes multiple selections for a single calculation group or does not make any selection at all. This enables better error handling and also can just provide a better default behavior in certain cases. This can also bring you some potential performance improvements. We've made some improvements to the DAX query review, including the reorde

ring of query tabs. The share feedback link is now on the command bar and we now have coach marks for DAX query review. We've also added three additional info DAX functions. ZOE DOUGLAS: My name is Zoe Douglas and I'm excited to show you some new additions we've made to the DAX query view. In the DAX query view, you can write a DAX query, and use that to see data in your model. Now we've made that even easier than before with Copilot. You click on the Copilot button, and then ask it to write a D

AX query for you to list, say, products by number of units sold. It will generate that DAX query. You can click "Keep it", and then "Run" to see the results of that generated DAX query. That's not all this Copilot can do. You can also ask this Copilot about DAX topics, such as what is the difference between SUM and SUMX? Now the Copilot is going to go ahead and give you a short description first. Then you can click See more to see a longer explanation with examples. Finally, we have added a shar

e feedback link to DAX query view. We'd love to hear your feedback. Thank you. SAVEEN REDDY: Creating relationships for your semantic models on the web is now easier thanks to the auto-detect relationships feature. Just go to the Home ribbon and select "Manage Relationships". Then choose Auto-detect. Power BI will find and create the relationships for you to improve the life of people using Power BI mobile apps. This month, we've made it possible to open Power BI items in full screen. Opening an

item in full screen is supported for both launch items and when using a universal link. Custom visuals that use the new authentication API are now also supported when viewed in the Power BI mobile app. No additional authentication is required. So it just makes it more seamless to explore data in the mobile app. In desktop developer mode, if you click on the title bar, you will see a new fly out that is specific for Power BI project. It lets you easily find the Power BI project files, as well as

the display name settings for the report and semantic model. You can also open the folder in File Explorer by clicking on the paths. Last November we announced the rename from the word dataset to semantic model. Now, when you save as a Power BI project file, the dataset folder and the definition.pbidatasetfile will both switch from using the term dataset to the term semantic model. Git integration got a little simpler this month. We've consolidated the item.metadata.json file, and the item.conf

ig.jsonfile into a single system file. This month we've introduced a new filter API. This API lets you create a visual that can filter matrix data hierarchically based on data points. This is going to be very useful for custom visuals that leverage group on keys and allows hierarchical filtering using identities. As always, we have many great visualizations and new visuals in AppSource this month. The Get Data button in Power BI Report Builder now lets you connect to new data sources such as Sno

wflake and Databricks. If you need a paginated report that supports parameter prompts in more than one language, well, before you had to create several reports, but now, you can simply set an expression for the prompt in Power BI Report Builder and specify the translated labels for the prompt. SPEAKER 2: You can connect to new data sources from Power BI Report Builder. For this demo, I will build a very simple EV car report by connecting to a Snowflake packet. To do this, click on the Data tab i

n Power BI Report Builder. Then you need to click "Get Data" on the tool bar. This will launch a Get Data window. Here, search for your database that you want to connect to, I've selected Snowflake. Enter the server name, enter the warehouse name, and the credentials. You could either use a sharable Cloud connection or create a new connection. Or this demo, I'm using a sharable Cloud connection. Once you have all of that information, click on "Next". Here, you can select the tables that you want

for your report. Since this is an EV report, I'm selecting the EV table, Transform data. Once you click on Transform data, you'll see your data in the Power Query editor. Here, you could either transform the data or edit the mash up and perform all the operations that you would using Power Query. For this report, I could remove a few of these columns because I don't need them. I'm going to remove vin column, I'm going to remove the county column. I think this is good. The dataset is successfull

y created. You can see the data source and dataset in Report Builder. I'm going to create a very simple report. Let me insert a table. Let's say MAKE, MODEL, and EV Type. As you can see, I deleted vin in my PQ, and that doesn't show up as part of the dataset. This looks okay. I go ahead and publish this report to my paginated reports demo workspace. I'm going to call this EV Cars, and Publish. Successfully published. I click on "Okay". This is my workspace. There we have EV cars. You can now sha

re this report or view this report. SAVEEN REDDY: In the latest version of the OneLake file explorer, you can now update your files directly using Excel. This works just like the really user-friendly experience that you have in OneDrive. We think this is really going to streamline your workflow, and it's just so much more intuitive to manage and edit your Excel documents. We previously enabled the ability to clone tables, but inherent to cloning is a problem because you're potentially cloning se

nsitive data. But now with table clones and synapse data warehouse, you can take advantage of row level security and dynamic data masking for the clone tables. The data warehouse editor can now extract from and publish to a SQL database project. This really simplifies several key scenarios. You can download a database project, and then develop the data warehouse schema in standard SQL database tools like Azure Database Studio or VS Code. You can publish existing database projects to a new fabric

warehouse. You can extract schema from a warehouse or SQL Analytics endpoint, and publish it to another warehouse. If you use the Copy into statement to import data, you may have a situation where you have to deal with small CSV files. This month we've made some nice performance improvements so that importing CSV files is faster. If data in Delta tables is not cached, then it needs to be read. That data has to be transcoded from Park A structures to in-memory structures. This month, we've made

some performance improvements to that transcoding for certain data types. SQL analytics, endpoints, and data warehouses use the identity of their owner to connect to OneLake. But what happens if that owner leaves the organization or their password expires? Then you have a real problem. To solve that problem, we are introducing something called the Takeover API. This allows you to change the owner from the current owner to someone else, and this can be an SPN or an organizational account. Eventho

use is now publicly available. Eventhouse offers a really groundbreaking solution that optimizes performance and cost by sharing capacity and resources across multiple databases. For cost optimization, Eventhouse suspends the service when not in use. This means there's a brief reactivation latency, but now you can configure it so that the service is maintained at a selected minimum level. This means you'll be paying for the chosen compute without premium storage charges. You can now connect to A

zure Data Explorer clusters from fabric using a friendly user interface. Once you've made that connection, it's easy to analyze and access data in Azure Data Explorer. We've added a new command bar for real-time dashboards. This is really going to improve some discoverability problems, some of you were struggling with. It has a better organization for buttons and actions in the ribbon. KQL databases already support the Delete command, which allows you to selectively delete records. Now, we are i

ntroducing the update command, which allows you to update records by deleting existing records, and depending new ones in a single transaction, It is critical to configure privacy levels correctly so that sensitive data is only viewed by authorized users, and now you have the ability to set privacy levels to your connections in data flows. The managed connections feature lets you see in a single glance all the connections that you have in use for your data flows, and general information about th

ose connections. We've improved it this month. Now, you'll be able to see all the data sources that are available in your data flow, even the ones without a connection set for them. Also, if you have data sources without a connection, you can now set a new connection from within the manage connections user experience. In the latest release of the Power Query SDK, there is a new test framework. Now, Power Query SDK developers have access to standard tests and a test harness to verify direct query

capabilities of an extension connector. The VNET data gateway for Fabric and Power BI is now generally available. This lets you connect your Azure and other data services to Microsoft Fabric and the Power platform. This means you can run Data flow Gen 2, Power BI semantic models, and power-platform data flows and Power BI pagenated reports on top of a VNET data gateway to ensure that no traffic is exposed to public endpoints. If you want to use the Get Data feature with Azure Resources, previou

sly you had to fill in a bunch of fields like the endpoint or URL or server and database name. But now it's much simpler, you can just browse all your Azure Resources, and automatically connect to them without going through all that manual work. Sometimes, you may need to share a connection in fabric because you want to collaborate within the same workload or maybe you want to share the workload with others. Connection sharing in fabric makes this easy to do. You can do it in a secure way, becau

se the secrets are never exposed. When you load data into a new table, by default, the automatic settings are on, and those automatic settings let's data flow manage the mappings for you, and that's very convenient. But you can disable the use of the automatic settings, and that will give you full control over how to load data into your data destination. SPEAKER 3: In this demo, I will use Fabric Dataflows Gen 2 and the VNET data gateway to output data to a Lakehouse from an Azure Blob storage a

ccount. The gateway connects to the storage account using a private endpoint for secure data access. Let's get started. First, I'll select the subscription that's going to host the VNET data gateway, and register the resource provider we need. Next, let's take a look at the network configuration settings on the data source. In the storage account network settings, you can see that all public network access is disabled. We do have a private endpoint configured. Now comes the second step in creati

ng the gateway. Let's go to the data sources virtual network, and create a subnet to delegate to the VNET data gateway. We give the subnet a name, allocate address space, and delegate it to a service, namely the Microsoft Power platform VNET access links. Then hit, "Save" and wait for the subnet to be created. There we go. Next, we'll create a VNET in the Fabric-managed connections and gateways page. We'll select the VNET tab, new. Then enter our subscription, our resource group, the VNET, and t

he subnet that we just delegated. We'll hit "Save." Finally, let's create the data flow. Here I'm using Get Data to connect to the Azure Blob storage account. First, I want to attempt creating a connection without the gateway to show that this should fail, because we disabled all public access on the data source. Nice, it failed. Now I'll create the connection through the VNET data gateway , and it succeeds. Now, I'll select the data I want and hit "Next" to enter the power query flow, and apply

whatever transformations I want. Finally, let's configure a data destination and select a Lakehouse. Here, I select the Lakehouse I want to output my data to. I'll hit "Publish." There we have it, the data flow. In this demo, we demonstrated how customers can securely connect to data sources located behind a VNET. This is how data factory fulfills the M0 network security requirements for outbound data access via a private network utilizing VNET data gateways. Thanks for watching. SAVEEN REDDY:

The Azure Databricks activity now has support for Unity catalog. With this update, you will now be able to configure the Unity catalog access mode for added data security. You can find this under Additional cluster settings. With the semantic model refresh activity, you can now create connections to your Power BI semantic model datasets and refresh them. For data activator, when setting conditions on the trigger, we have added a feature that allows you to detect when there's been a change in you

r data by either absolute number or as a percentage. That's all for this month. Please visit our Fabric Community forums at aka.ms/FabricCommunity. It's the best place for you to connect with others and get answers to your questions. Please, let us know how we can do better. Like, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for watching.