December 2024 Power Platform News

What’s new and interesting in the world of Power Platform?

Power BI

From the Power BI Core Visuals vision board:

• Sparklines are under development for the new card visual – these will allow a tiny trendline without inserting multiple line chart visuals, pretty stoked for this!
• Improvements are under development for card visual small multiples
• Improvements are under development for the new list slicer (I did a short intro on this visual here when it came out)
• The new text slicer was released last month and has several improvements underway
• There’s a Gantt chart on the roadmap for core visuals – it’s not in development yet, but it is on a roadmap! Including this tidbit for all my Planner people. 🙂

Sidenote, the vision board linked above is also a Power BI report itself – @Power BI Park has a “reverse-engineer” tutorial here.

In other Power BI / Fabric news, org apps were also released recently, allowing multiple apps per workspace (Fabric capacity only) as well as folders in Power BI workspaces (all license tiers, there’s now a button for it in the toolbar).

For Power Platform broadly, the buzz is around the new copilot autonomous agents; Lisa Crosbie has an explanation of these here.

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Planner and SharePoint

From the roadmap: The following are listed as “in development” but are scheduled to roll out soon—

• SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) – in preview, you can now limit discoverability of files in SharePoint. This is targeted at copilot: people are worried copilot will show people stuff that they should not see. Make sure your SharePoint site permissions are what you want them to be first and foremost, people! This feature works by limiting search, generally, because copilot can’t serve you anything you can’t already find in search. SAM will come with copilot licenses, no need to pay extra there. This also gets you site lifecycle management, which your SharePoint admin is probably dying to get their hands on. This is in preview now, general release in February 2025. Learn more here.
• Planner – board view for “my tasks” coming January 2025. Planner is shaping up to be the place where Microsoft is combining tasks from premium and basic tier Planner; I’m interested to see what this will look like. The “normal” grouping for the board views is by bucket, and “my tasks” combines tasks from multiple plans, which likely do not have the same buckets for each plan – so will they still be grouped by bucket? We’ll see!
• Planner – unified tab experience in Teams in January 2025. You will now be able to add both premium and basic Planner plans as tabs.
• SharePoint – December 2025 – New “hero” web part layouts coming! Hero web parts are the fancy banner-style text with links on SharePoint pages. This is a favorite web part for me.
• SharePoint – December 2025 – New web part called “editorial card” coming (TBD what this looks like or does, I can’t find any screenshots, and I did look!)
• Microsoft Lists – attachments to the “new” form experience and conditional branching coming. This says coming November 2024, but we’re in December and I don’t see it in my early-release tenant yet. Conditional branching has been something I have vaguely hoped for, but not expected to get for like… 10 years… so I hope it’s good! You can also now add lookup columns on the fancy new list forms.

What I’ve been up to

This month, I’m trying to figure out how to use my new camera and video editing keyboard thingus, celebrating the American tradition of consumerism (buying things!) to celebrate hitting 10k subscribers on YouTube! 😂

Last month I published some videos on how to make the Power BI matrix visual do what you want, tricks for using Excel sources in Power BI without losing your mind, and how to use my favorite open-source date table.