Most needed ideas from ideas.powerbi.com

Power BI is growing as a tool and as a platform. When you compare what we have now and what we had a few years ago you will see a completely different set of tools with a different set of capabilities. Some time ago in 2018, I wrote an article about top ideas that in my opinion were crucial (the article is written in Polish and can be found here). After all those years I decided to create a similar article where I will post my personal top ideas taken from ideas.powerbi.com. Why did I want to do that? Because I wanted to share my view with you and encourage you to contribute. So what are my favorite ideas? Let’s see!

Page (tab) level security

Link: click

Current status: under review

Number of votes: 9294

Currently, we have the possibility to secure our data on the report using Row Level Security but sometimes we have to filter pages visible on the report also based on who is looking or other factors like filter selection etc. Of course, you can implement some kind of workaround with bookmarks or create separate reports but it is problematic from a maintenance perspective – I can bet that all of you saw “bookmark hell” with tens of bookmarks adjusted to achieve something pretty simple like navigation of conditional visibility. Personally, I see many different scenarios in my implementations that will benefit from page-level security and it will give additional tool in our hands to provide more reliable data products. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will be implemented!

Folder to organize content withing workspace

Link: click

Current status: planned

Number of votes: 6272

We have the option to organize Power BI content into workspaces but sometimes it is not enough. During my consultancy work, I saw many different implementations that have tens of reports and datasets stored in one workspace – it was quite messy. It will be great to create a simple folder hierarchy where we will organize all the stuff – it will simplify the user experience when searching for a proper artifact. I can imagine it is not as simple as we can think because it will affect not only the visual experience on the portal but many different things but I am pretty sure the product team will manage.

Power BI source control

Link: click

Current status: planned

Number of votes: 1760

I saw many times how Power BI developers try to organize their own work. Creating many different “versions” of the report as a separate file for sure is not the best option. Some people (including me) want to create versions using OneDrive or GIT but it is not the real source control but the only version of a file without the possibility to see “what changed”. Of course, we have the option to use tools like Data Tools to create models and see differences in JSON structures but visualizations still cannot be anyhow compared. Integration with a source control system like GIT for sure will be a
game-changer for a lot of people and will increase cooperation within the team. It is highly voted by the community but if you have to choose one item on this list to vote I will propose this one.

Visibility (hide an item)

Link: click

Current status: planned

Number of votes: 1621

Recently I was asked if it is possible to hide a specific chart if there is no data on it. It is an interesting question and the answer is even more interesting because it is not possible to achieve something like this currently. If there will be some kind of property that will give us the possibility to use expression and hide/show visuals based on that then our life will be much easier. In one of the other “ideas” there was the response from Microsoft that they are working on some kind of expressions on visual level so maybe some day we will see something like this especially that it is available in other tools like Paginated Reports.

Slicer Search – Add “Select All Results” option

Link: click

Current status: needs votes

Number of votes:1030

This one is something that I am waiting for a very long time. When you have a lot of items in a slicer and you have to find all that starts with “A” then you type this letter and… you have to select all found items one by one. Sometimes it is not possible to do that and the option “select all found” or something similar will be a great improvement. If Power BI Product team is looking for inspiration I can point out the feature available in Excel where we can with one click select all found items – it is called “Add current selection to filter”:

Matrix/Table grand totals with Measures

Link: click

Current status: under review

Number of votes: 638

I didn’t put on this list many items that are just improvements and there is a well-known workaround to achieve the same result but this idea is an exception. It is a widespread scenario where people are preparing measures in DAX and it works well on the row level but the total is wrong. It can be fixed inside the DAX but it is not the simplest task that you can imagine so people struggle with that on daily basis. How to simplify that? Maybe some kind of property that will control total as “use DAX” or “Total of rows” – for sure it will help many people.

DAX measures at visual level

Link: click

Current status: planned

Number of votes: 2711

This one sounds strange but when you think about the possibilities that it will give then you will realize how powerful it can be. Imagine that you have two levels of calculation – one is in a data model with measures and all this stuff and you have also a visualization level where you can build expressions on top of your model. Sounds crazy but it is not something new – in Reporting Services you have a dataset and based on that you have the possibility to use expressions in a lot of properties on the visual level. when you will think about it carefully it can solve many problems from this list and will give a lot of modeling possibilities to our hands.

Strange title isn’t it? It is but when you read the description of this idea it will be clear to you that it’s a killer feature. It describes the situation when you have a table visual and you want to have a
drill-down possibility but starting from a specific row/column. For example, you have 10 columns and first, four should be visible always, and the rest of them should be available after clicking “+”. In many scenarios it will be a great improvement and like in other cases it will be a game changer. Surprisingly it has a very low number of votes so log in and give a few more!

 

That is all that I wanted to show. Please remember that other products also have their own feedback pages. Power Apps or feedback.azure.com covers all the Azure cloud services. Put your ideas there and vote for existing ones because you have the possibility to impact how a product will look in the future. Of course, there is many more interesting ideas that can improve our daily life but this is a list that I personally think is important. What is your favorite “idea”?