Microsoft's Power BI Desktop Makes Quick Work Out of Big Datasets

The updated desktop client makes working with large datasets less of a waiting game for Power BI Premium customers. Although somewhat overshadowed by the many cloud-focused announcements at this year's Build developer conference, the Power BI group at Microsoft also unveiled some major new updates to the desktop client used to create reports on the cloud-enabled business intelligence and data analytics platform. In the May 2018 update of Power BI Desktop, Microsoft introduced an incremental refresh feature that enables the software and its users to work better with large datasets stored in Power BI Premium. Currently in beta, the feature offers controls and filters that allow users to set ranges and how long data is stored, among several other options. "You can define the refresh policy in Power BI Desktop to determine how data is incrementally refreshed when published to the Power BI service," explained Amanda Cofsky, a Power BI program manager at Microsoft, in a blog post. "Refreshes are faster, more efficient and more reliable because only the new data needs to be refreshed." Initially, users may not notice an improvement in performance since historical data must be loaded first, cautioned Cofsky. Subsequent refreshes will be faster after this early step, she added. In terms of Power BI's reporting capabilities, Microsoft has added a new conditional-formatting feature that allows users to format a column using colors derived from a different field for richer data mashups. In addition, the May 2018 update includes a number of enhancements that offer users more flexibility in how they present data in their reports, including the ability to synchronize multiple slicers. Also new are enhanced Drillthrough filtering capabilities and two new custom visualizations.