The June release of PowerBI comes with a truly great update for reporting, the updated Card visual. No more tricks about ‘masking’ blanks as zeroes, no more overlaying transparent frames over Cards, no more grouping of multiple visual elements to get the level of dynamic information users also requests. Beside that though, there is another feature that will be great for a much wider audience – executives, administration, HR, any team lead, anyone in corporate that has to present. Why? Because now, Power BI allows links to individual visuals – meaning that a PowerPoint slide can now become a dynamic dashboard in it’s own right linked to multiple live reports. About 5 years ago, a colleague of mine and I had a recurring reminder in our agendas – to help the management update the charts in the slide decks for quarterly reviews. The Excel aficionados among you may know that there is an option to add a linked Excel graph to PowerPoint with similar goal – to dynamically pull data instead of adding screenshots that will be outdated as soon as the meeting is over. There were caveats, access issues, sync issues etc. So, I think we’re now in the era of Slides 2.0 – where data lives in the cloud, appearing dynamic and responsive in your presentations, where switching back and forth between PowerPoint (presenter mode) and your browser will no longer be necessary.
There will certainly be counter-arguments – that a slide deck must stay static etc. With the proper set-up, however, I think we’ll save ourselves the pain of repeating useless copy-pasting, alignment, formatting and adjustment, again and again. And that makes me a little happier.
Vitali on Data 