Plan and prepare for Power BI in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new in Power BI?. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power BI.
Overview
Microsoft business intelligence helps drive a data culture where everyone at every level of an organization can make confident decisions with data at any scale. To enable organizations to drive a data culture, we're investing in three key areas:
- Empower every individual with instantly familiar experiences and AI-infused insights.
- Empower every team with BI woven into the fabric of where teams work, making data a standard part of every decision and turning insights into actions.
- Empower every organization to meet the most demanding enterprise needs for scalability and governance.
Empower every individual
Power BI continues to innovate and make it easier than ever for everyone to work with data. To build a data culture, every single individual needs to have instantly familiar experiences combined with easy-to-discover insights. Whether that involves authors creating reports by using the free Power BI Desktop tool, or consumers exploring data in the Power BI service and mobile applications, or individuals in Microsoft 365 using data to make better decisions, Power BI makes it easy and delightful to work with data. Power BI has taken advantage of a lot of the AI advancements in Microsoft Research to help our users find patterns in the vast amounts of data and insights that are readily available to use. Power BI will continue to empower every business user and business analyst to get amazing insights with AI-infused experiences. To ensure that those insights are available to everyone in the organization, wherever they are and in context, we developed the world-leading mobile BI app and provided embedded capabilities for your applications, websites, and portals. This empowers individuals across an organization to drive and grow the data culture.
Empower every team
Power BI makes data a standard part of every team's decision-making by deeply integrating BI into the places where teams work and infusing it into the most common collaboration experiences. Power BI integration in Microsoft Teams will continue to mature, deepening the integration in channels, chats, and notifications within Microsoft Teams. In addition, customers have told us that they value the ability to quickly move from insight to action to automation. Microsoft Power Platform makes this uniquely possible with Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. These products are natively designed to work together to make it easy for customers to adapt quickly to changing business requirements. Insights become more valuable as they're shared, and by integrating Power BI deeply with Office 365 (Microsoft Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and more) we bring insights to where everyone works and collaborates.
Empower every organization
Power BI can scale to meet the most demanding needs of large enterprise customers. With the centralized administration, governance, and industry-leading security capabilities in Power BI, IT always has full visibility and control. Power BI Premium provides unmatched capabilities in a single integrated BI platform without requiring customers to string together and integrate multiple products with high costs and disjointed experiences. With Power BI Premium, we bring capabilities that were previously only available to professional data engineers in IT organizations to analysts, accelerating time to value and helping put more power in the hands of business. This balance between business and IT is one of the reasons why the world's largest organizations are increasingly standardizing on Power BI and moving away from expensive, legacy BI products. With each release, Power BI Premium adds features that help organizations accelerate the delivery of insights at scale. These investments span many areas, such as Microsoft-owned resource management, auto-scale and pay-as-you-go pricing, advanced self-service data prep, interactive experiences over big data, and meeting advanced security and governance requirements.
For official product documentation and training for Power BI, go to:
Updates to Power BI 2021 release wave 2
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only
Investment areas
Power BI Pro
To build a data culture, everyone needs to be able to discover and collaborate on insights. Whether that involves authors creating reports by using the free Power BI Desktop tool, consumers exploring data in the Power BI service or mobile applications, or users of Microsoft 365 using data to make better decisions, Power BI will continue to evolve to make it easier than ever to work with data. To help organizations foster that data culture, we'll invest in the following:
- Instantly familiar experiences and AI-infused insights: Power BI will continue to advance our creator experiences, making it easier than ever to create beautiful and engaging content for the entire organization. This includes new report authoring tools such as sparklines for table and matrix visuals, artifact-level access for managing Power BI apps, and continued improvements to the datasets hub.
- Amazing consumer experiences: Consumer experiences will continue to evolve, both in the Power BI service and the Power BI mobile applications. This includes improvements to Excel export from table and matrix visuals, and easy creation from Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics 365.
- BI woven into the fabric of the organization: Power BI integration in Microsoft Teams will continue to evolve, deepening the integration in channels, chats, and notifications within Teams.
Power BI Premium
With each release, Microsoft Power BI Premium continues to deliver features that help organizations accelerate the delivery of insights at scale, meeting the most demanding needs of an enterprise. The 2021 release wave 2 investments will span the following areas:
- Microsoft-owned resource management: You won't have to worry about workload spikes and capacity utilization that can affect the speed of work.
- Auto-scale and pay-as-you-go pricing: You'll have the ability to scale beyond resource capacity without experiencing drops in performance.
- Advanced self-service data prep: Seamlessly ingest, prepare, and refresh data and reuse the data prep building blocks across Microsoft Power Platform and Azure.
- Interactive experiences over big data: Build reports on massive volumes of data in big data sources, such as Azure Synapse Analytics. Your reports are automatically made to perform well, and the full solution can be monitored end-to-end with ease.
- Operational reporting and distribution: Author and distribute pixel-perfect operational reports to millions of users.
- Advanced security: As data becomes more accessible, preventing risk of data leaking is critical. Secure and protect your data with labels from Microsoft Purview Information Protection. Discover and govern your data assets through Microsoft Azure Purview.
Power BI Embedded
Power BI Embedded enables developers to offer world-class analytics without developing it themselves. Developers can quickly and easily provide customer-facing reports, dashboards, and analytics in their own applications by using and branding Power BI as their own. Power BI Embedded reduces developer resource needs by automating the monitoring, management, and deployment of analytics, while maintaining full control of the application, Power BI features, and intelligent analytics.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Power BI below:
For application administrators
User impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Power BI
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Power BI. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Power BI. |
| User community | Engage with Power BI experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Power BI. |