- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube! In this video, talk about
what's going on with Power BI. We've heard all of the
Microsoft Fabric updates. You've been seeing a lot
of Fabric videos here on Guy in a Cube talking
Fabric in our live streams that happen every Saturday morning. And what about Power BI? Like Patrick loves Power BI. I love Power BI. You probably love Power BI. I want to tell you that Power BI is still
front and center, right? This is still a big part
of Microsoft Fabric. When I say Fabric, I'm
not excluding Power BI. I am including it, right? So it's part of the
Microsoft Fabric platform and SaaS offering. If you were using Power BI, well, you just got a lot of new added
capabilities as part of it. So if you think about Power
BI and the portal experiences, the workspaces, the capacities, the administration aspects of it, the interconnecting pieces that we can leverage with Power BI, those things are still present but now it's been expanded, right? And so when we think about a workspace, a workspace can have much
more than just Power BI. When we think about the portal itself, we've got these new persona experiences for not only Power BI, but
data engineering, data science, data warehousing, all of
these different capabilities. And these are now the
platform of Microsoft Fabric. And then we've got Power BI
workloads and capabilities that are part of that. When we think about reports and data sets, paginated reports, interactive reports, these are all things that
are part of Power BI itself and that make Power BI amazing. Power BI Desktop is still there
and still getting updates. One big question I've had from both customers
and even internally is, "How do I migrate my
existing Power BI content over to Microsoft Fabric?" The great thing is you don't have to. It's already there. So the minute Microsoft Fabric
was turned on, guess what? Your workspaces are still workspaces. Your Power BI reports are
still in those workspaces, and so you don't have to migrate anything. It's just there. If you already had Power
BI Premium Capacity for your organization, well guess what? That now supports all
of the Fabric workloads. So now you can actually
leverage the full capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, including Power BI, and if you wanna learn more about the different licensing options, you know, what happens with
Pro and Premium per user, check out this licensing video. I just go through all of those options. So definitely be sure to check that out to understand that more. Again, one thing you've
been seeing a lot of, the videos that we've been publishing so far on Microsoft Fabric is about some of those new
workloads and new capabilities within inside a Microsoft Fabric. There's a lot of education
that needs to happen. A lot of people are trying to understand what this is all about. How do I leverage shortcuts? How to think about OneLake. There's Notebook capabilities
and Spark capabilities, all these new things. But what if you're just
using Power BI, right? I was just doing work. I've got projects that are in play. Continue to do that. None
of that's going away. So the ability to import
data into Power BI, to leverage Direct
Query, to create reports, publish reports, all of that
is still available today. So if you're used to
that, if you know that, continue doing that. But now you've got other
tools in your tool belt that you can start thinking about when it comes to future projects, or maybe if you wanna
improve existing projects, how do we maybe think about
these new capabilities and leverage those capabilities to take Power BI even further? If you've already got projects in flight, or you've already been planning projects that leverage Power BI, don't feel like you have to disrupt that just because there's something
new in the mix, right? If you have time to evaluate that and incorporate that in
your project plans, awesome. But if you've already
got something in flight, continue with that path. And then as you think about new projects, that's where you may
wanna start rethinking about Microsoft Fabric as a whole and how do we leverage those capabilities when we think about OneLake
and one copy of the data, so on and so forth. Probably the biggest new
capability for Power BI that came with Microsoft Fabric is this Direct Lake capability. So this idea of one copy, if
we get data into the Lakehouse and being able to leverage that
across the different engines that are in Microsoft
Fabric, including Power BI, that is very powerful and something you should
be learning more about. Those are things that are
gonna propel Power BI usage. Guess what? There's gonna be more great capabilities coming for Power BI. Power BI is not gonna stop. It's gonna continue iterating,
adding new capabilities. One of the big announcements that was made was Git integration inside
of Microsoft Fabric. And guess what? The June, 2023 release of Power BI Desktop has this Power BI project capability. So the ability to save out
a Power BI Desktop report and data model to a folder with JSON files that make it usable with Git. So we can do DIFs, merges,
things of that nature. You also saw the announcements
on Copilot for Power BI. Everyone's going bananas
over Copilot for Power BI. This is another great capability that will be coming in the future. So, you know, stay tuned to this channel and the Fabric blogs to
learn more about that once it's announced and
available for public preview. That thing I love was what
Zoe Douglas talked about in the BUILD 2023 session where she talked about the
vision of what's ahead, not necessarily like
what's coming tomorrow, but what they're thinking about with improvements of Power BI Desktop and DAX capabilities,
authoring capabilities. Those are all things they're
focused on to improve Power BI and make it more usable for you. So I hope this helps you
understand just Power BI as a whole and how it fits in with Microsoft Fabric. We're still gonna focus on Power BI. Patrick yells at me all the time. "We need a Power BI video!
We need a Power BI video!" And we will. We will still help you engage and learn and leverage Power BI
within your organization. If you wanna learn more about
Microsoft Fabric all up, check out this playlist
that we've put together just to help you get started
learning all the new things. Again, keep engaging
with our Power BI content on this channel and join us every Saturday
for our live streams. As always, thank you so much for watching. Keep being awesome, and we'll
see you in the next video.
