Power BI
There’s a first-ever Power BI Data Visualization Championship happening Feb 14 – Mar 31! The winners get free conference and hotel stay at the Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas.
Most of the news this month is for premium/Fabric:
- There is a new FCC (Fabric Copilot Capacity) SKU for Copilot in Power BI. This allows you to use the Fabric Copilot throughout all of your Power BI workspaces in your organization, even if they’re not hosted in a premium workspace. It can be assigned to “the entire organization” or “a specific user group”.
- You can now add Copilot summaries to Power BI email subscriptions (premium capacity required)
- Workspace monitoring will start consuming premium capacity March 3
Power Apps
- 6 more Power Apps modern controls are generally available for Power Apps.
- The new Plan Designer is in preview – it makes an attempt at creating a full solution for you, including apps and tables. You can try it out in the Power Apps maker portal by toggling on the new Power Apps experience in the top toolbar and entering a prompt into the “create a solution for almost any business problem” box. I did a review of this feature here.
Planner
- “Portfolios” has officially rolled out as a feature in premium Planner, meaning you can assign multiple projects to a portfolio and track progress as a group. This uses a “sync” feature to copy the data, it’s slightly awkward.
- You can now “add to Outlook” to see a plan in your Outlook calendar. This currently requires publishing your plan to the web, where anyone with a link can view.
SharePoint & Lists
- Conditional branching has been released for Microsoft Lists! I did a walkthrough of it here.
- There was a big hoopla AMA event with Jeff Tepper, recording here. This was primarily a marketing push for agents and Copilot (Copilot will help create your SharePoint pages and add metadata to your items for you; the sizzle reel is always inspiring). Agents will be accessible with Copilot licensing or pay as you go metered. Notes:
- SharePoint Agents will exist as an editable .agent file in the document library for the site they apply to.
- New hero web part layouts and flexible sections will allow more design options (rollout this quarter).
- Send approvals directly from SharePoint using an integrated approval to specific people – I am not sure how this will function, it looks like a manual trigger flow which is a bit odd (usually you want approvals to be an automated trigger).
- Auto-translation of files (but not pages) is already out.
Copilot
- Copilot agents are the big news in Copilot Studio. The experience is a bit rough at this point, but the gist is that they are a new way to build your custom copilot that is able to do things via prompt (essentially, it’s a chatbot to build your chatbot that can somewhat handle flow actions). Under the hood, it looks like it still uses the architecture of the Power Virtual Agents with generative answers.
- Copilot Vision is in preview – this lets you chat with copilot in Edge about web pages in a more dynamic way.
What I’ve been up to
New videos!
- How to use Microsoft Lists in Power BI, including multi-value fields
- How to combine tables in Power BI – we combined task data from multiple projects lists as an example using append
- Cumulative Sum Visualization to show estimated vs actual hours over time (this will be used in the upcoming dashboard)
- Channel membership is now enabled! This is equivalent to YouTube’s “buy me a coffee” and grants access to a zip file with a slew of PBIX and flow solution exports from channel tutorials. You can read more about what’s included here.
Coming soon: Project Management Dashboard in Power BI Desktop