This week's update is a bit different than our normal update. This week brings improvements that make it easier for organizations and individuals to acquire Power BI licenses and for admins to monitor the health of Power BI. Also… just because we couldn’t resist, one small improvement for those of you who author reports in the service…
- Guided Power BI Purchase Experience
- Individuals Can Buy Power BI Pro
- Power BI Status in O365 Admin Portal
- Duplicate Report Page
Guided Power BI Purchase Experience
Buying Power BI Pro is easier than ever with our new purchase experience. When you are ready to buy Power BI Pro, start by selecting Purchase on the pricing page.
After that we will ask you a few simple questions to guide you to the right purchase experience for you. In no more than three questions, you will be able to start buying Power BI for either yourself or your team.
Individuals can buy Power BI Pro
In addition to the updated purchase flow, we now allow individuals to purchase Power BI for themselves. While going through the purchase experienced described above, you will be asked if you want to purchase Power BI for your team or organization or for yourself.
By picking Myself, you will be taking to a Checkout page which will ask you to review your order.
After you have reviewed the order and clicked Next, you can enter in your payment information and start using Power BI Pro!
Power BI Status in O365 Admin Portal
As an IT admin, it is incredibility important to know the health status of the tools used by your company. You are now able to see the health of the Power BI service in the O365 Admin Portal alongside all your O365 services.
To see the status of all your services and their components including Power BI:
- Sign in to Office 365 with your work account.
- Go to the Office 365 admin center.
- On the Dashboard section you will see Power BI under Service health
You can also see the health status in the Service health section. The service health page lets you see whether there has been a service interruption or outage. It also shows status information for today, the past six days, and 30 days of history, and shows when planned maintenance is scheduled for your services.
To reach this page, go to Service health > Service health (or Service status> Track service health and maintenance). On the Current status page, you can view the status for today and the preceding six days. Additionally, you can do any of the following:
- To see additional components or features of a service, select the down arrow next to that service.
- For details, select a status icon. See more about service status icon here
- To see status history, select View history for past 30 days.
- Select the RSS link to sign up for the service health RSS feed, which will send you mail when a new event is added or an existing event is updated.
We hope that you like these new features. Try them out and let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Duplicate Report Page
A common scenario when creating reports is to have multiple pages that are identical except for having different filters applied. For example, you may want a report page to look at your market share in each region you do business in. Previously, you had to recreate the same page for each region from scratch, but with this update to Power BI, you can create the page once and duplicate it as many times as you need.
You start by creating one page with the layout you want and the page level filter set. In our example, we created a page showing market share and applied a Page Level Filter to filter the data down to the Central Region.
Once the first page is ready, clicking the Duplicate this page button on the top right will create a duplicate of the page.
After that all, all you need to do is update the filter and the name to have a new customized page. In our case, we updated the title of the page and changed the page level filter to the East region.
Last but not least, check our past weekly updates to stay up to date on the latest and greatest for the Power BI service.