It will be a happy new year for many analysts - Q&A comes to Power BI Desktop, albeit in Preview. That's not all - Microsoft has been busy with Christmas present production as they have made a large amount of updates, thus showing why you do need to keep this free software up to date.

In summary, here's the latest additions:

Reporting

• Q&A for report creation (Preview)
• Cross-highlighting for bookmarks
• More bookmark flexibility
• Field properties pane and field descriptions
• Scatter visual from x- and y-axis groupings
• High density sampling for maps based on latitude and longitude
• Responsive slicers
• New custom visuals

Analytics

• Drill filters other visuals

Data Connectivity

• Adobe Analytics connector (Preview)
• HDInsight Interactive Query connector
• Data.World connector
• SAP BW connector improvements
• IBM Netezza connector now generally available.

As always, we'll be detailing these updates, although due to the late publication, this will be in our February newsletter. Please remember we have training in Power BI which you can find out more about here. If you are not already a subscriber, why not sign up at the bottom of any SumProduct web page? And don't forget to download the latest version of Power BI Desktop here too.