Power BI Desktop April 2021 Updates

Another month and another Power BI Desktop update. What does April 2021 have in store? Keep reading.

In the April 2021 edition, there are quite a few features I want to highlight for you. The most exciting feature in my opinion is the new custom visual dedicated to Power Automate. With this visual, you can kick off a Power Automate with a click of a button directly from your report page. There are a few templates already in the visual, but Microsoft plans on releasing many more shortly. You can also create a custom flow and not start with a template.

The Small Multiples preview feature has some updates when it comes to the padding of the visual as well as the ability to access Small Multiples in the combo chart visuals.

The shapes feature has had a complete overhaul. Instead of the standard 5 shapes that were available in the Power BI Desktop previously, with this release, there are now 21 shapes to choose from. Not only do you have more shapes to choose from, but a plethora of new design features. These features range from text options, shadow effects, round edges, rotations, and many more.

Also, the ability to extract a table by example from a Text/CSV data connection is now generally available. The auto-detection of tables from an Excel file and JSON file is now generally available as well.

The Power BI Service has a new way to share reports through a link rather than the standard direct access way.

Two new data connections are also included in this release. You can connect to data Bloomberg Data and Analytics as well as SoftOne BI.

If you are interested in seeing some demonstrations on these new features check out the video below.

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