We are thrilled to announce that for the sixteenth consecutive year, Microsoft has been positioned as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.1 Microsoft has also been positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, and highest in the Ability to Execute in the Magic Quadrant for the fifth consecutive year.

With Microsoft Power BI, we strive to bring our customers and users the richest and most intuitive business intelligence (BI) experience on the market. We are helped tremendously in this effort by the millions of Power BI community members whose feedback has helped us create and refine so much of what makes Power BI great. Thank you all for your ideas and constant support.

The last year has been a truly exciting period of innovation with hundreds of features and enhancements which help us more effectively empower every individual, team, and organization who wants to get more value from their data.

For our engaged and growing community of report builders, we have released a set of features designed to help them do more, faster. First, on the data side, we announced datamarts in Power BI which is a new Power BI Premium self-service capability that enables users to perform relational database analytics and uncover actionable insights from their data. It seamlessly puts the power of SQL databases in the hands of our report builders, while ensuring these datamarts can be centrally governed and managed by admins. We also announced data model editing in the Power BI service which enables users on the web to navigate to a dataset and edit it using a similar model view interface as found inside Power BI Desktop—allowing users to work and collaborate simultaneously on the same data model. On the tooling side, we released a new Optimize ribbon in Power BI Desktop, which includes options to pause and refresh visual queries and optimization presets. Report builders also now have access to contextual on-object controls for Power BI visuals, enabling users to select elements in charts and edit the format or properties of those elements to create stunning, pixel-perfect reports. In October, we released a feature that combined the power of the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create quick measures suggestions for Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), enabling report builders to create DAX measures using natural language instead of using templates or writing DAX from scratch.

Insights are only impactful when they are in the hands of those who can use them to inform actions and decisions. That’s why we have worked to improve how users share their reports and visuals with their team members. With new integrations across Microsoft PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Office Hub, and Teams, organizations can turn their Microsoft 365 apps into hubs for uncovering insights and fostering a data-driven culture. Users can now include interactive Power BI reports or even single visuals directly in PowerPoint and include reports as descriptive cards inside of Outlook emails. We also announced the ability to save Power BI files to OneDrive and SharePoint and edit from there directly to help make it easier to collaboratively build reports. To bring Power BI and Microsoft Teams together even further, we’ve released a score of new features including the ability to embed organizational apps in Teams, the ability to share Power BI reports and visuals directly in chats with preview cards, the new Power BI in Teams mobile experience, and so much more. Outside of Microsoft 365, we announced a much-improved cross-tenant sharing experience for datasets, reports, and everything else to help make collaboration easier and more fruitful across organizations.

To help teams align around the same targets, we also announced the general availability of metrics in Power BI—a new experience to help teams keep track of their most important business metrics and objectives in a single pane view. To make this experience even more useful, we released an array of new features including hierarchies; linked metrics; the ability to move, copy, embed, and follow scorecards; the ability to share links to scorecards and individual metrics; a mobile experience for metrics in Power BI; and new Microsoft Viva Goals and metrics in Power BI integrations.

For organizations trying to manage the complexity of a data-driven organization, we’ve released several features to help governance and administration. We announced an extension of the Microsoft Purview data loss prevention (DLP) policies for Power BI to support detection of uploading sensitive information such as social security numbers and credit card numbers. We then released a couple enhancements for these DLP policies that included CPU metering for DLP policy evaluation and overriding policy tips for reporting false positives. We also released greater governance controls over My workspaces that allow admins to gain access to the contents of any user’s My workspace, designate a capacity for all existing and new My workspaces, and prevent users from moving My workspaces to a different capacity. For organizations that have Power BI reports with a live connection to Azure Analysis Services (AAS), we published an automated migration tool that simplifies and accelerates this migration experience.

For organizations that use Power BI Embedded to provide dashboards and analytics in their own applications, we’ve released a library of new features including a quick create software development kit (SDK). This SDK allows organizations to embed an experience in their own apps that auto-generates basic Power BI reports for users based on data they are currently viewing. We also introduced service principle profiles which gives the ability for app owners to manage a much larger number of customers on one service principal. Recently, we announced an exciting new form of Power BI embedded analytics that enables organizations to embed an interactive data exploration and report creation experience in their applications. By using this new set of Power BI client APIs, third-party apps can pass in data source information, and Power BI will automatically generate a dataset and report for users to explore, modify, and if they choose, save to a workspace in their Power BI tenant.

Check out how companies like Walmart, T-Mobile, and Bayer have used many of these features to turn their data into immediate impact across their teams. And these features only scratch the surface of hundreds of features and enhancements we’ve released over the past year. Follow the monthly features summaries on our Power BI blog and YouTube channel to stay up to date with the latest feature releases.

Get your copy of the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, and find out why we were named a Leader for the sixteenth year in a row.

1 Gartner; Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms; Kurt Schlegel, Julian Sun, David Pidsley, Anirudh Ganeshan, Fay Fei, Aura Popa, Radu Miclaus, Edgar Macari, Kevin Quinn, Christopher Long; 5 April 2023.

Recognized in Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, from 2013 – 2022 and Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, from 2008 – 2012.

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