What’s new and interesting in the world of Power Platform?
Power BI
From the Power BI Core Visuals vision board, January feature release blog, and YouTube:
- Treemap visual has been updated! This is the visual that is a series of colored tiles in groupings. You can now change the style type (squarified, binary, alternating), add padding between the tiles, and padding between the category groupings.
- The core visuals program manager, Miguel Myers, did a livestream preview of what’s coming for core visuals here with Reid Havens.
- Miguel Myers is also gathering feedback about the bookmark feature in Power BI here.
- Marco Russo, one of the “fathers” of DAX, has a video on what’s coming in 2025 for DAX here.
- A new Fabric exam, the DP-700 was released. This has more focus on the data engineering side in Azure vs the DP-600. Both are currently labeled “Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate”.
- Semantic model version history just rolled out; this is for premium workspaces.
Power Platform
- April Dunham announced the Powerful Devs online conference/hackathon coming February 28th. As far as I can tell, this is a free event and cash prizes are involved for each category, so it looks like a great skill-building and networking opportunity! More info here.
- There’s some rebranding/restructuring happening with Copilot. Essentially, the copilot in Office/Teams is now called “Microsoft 365 Copilot,” and the copilot that handles agents and web-summarization which you typically experience in a web browser is called “Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat”.
- The chat that uses the web as a source is free
- The agents that access organizational resources is now pay-as-you-go
- The Office/Teams copilots are still a separate monthly license
Planner
- There is a “project manager agent” coming to Premium Planner preview in April 2025 that will AI-manage email status updates (Feature ID: 474452)
SharePoint / Lists
- More info is now available about the new “editorial card” web part, you can read more on Joao Ferreira’s blog here
- Conditional branching in MS Lists forms now shows as releasing in January 2025 (previously this was slated for November 2024)
What I’ve been up to
The YouTube channel hit 1 million views today – THANK YOU all, I was caught somewhat off-guard when I got the notification. 😄
There has been a lot of demand to customize the way Planner looks, behaves, and is structured. Since we can’t control the product beyond submitting ideas to be voted on, I am putting together a new video series on how to make your own custom “Planner” board with Microsoft Lists. This will let you add columns, connect to the data directly, bulk import tasks, create templates, all while looking somewhat similar to Planner via a board view. In this series so far:
How to create your task list and templates
Create a flow that sets the percentage complete and completed date automatically
Use the “export to Power BI” feature in the list
Future topics: creating the model from scratch, cumulative total estimated vs actual hours visualization, combining multiple lists in Power BI, and email/chat task reminders in Power Automate
I’ve consolidated common Power Automate questions from comments into a blog post