Power BI + ZoomCharts = (Power BI)²: Boost your productivity and add the cool-factor to your reports

By Tzvi Keisar as written on powerbi.microsoft.com

As of today, all Microsoft Power BI users can start using dynamic and cool-looking ZoomCharts in reports and dashboards.

With ZoomCharts, you can easier than ever before, explore, present and analyze your data. Full multi-touch support makes interaction seamless across all your devices.

Try it yourself with this Power BI live report to feel the difference:

How do ZoomCharts custom visuals increase your productivity with Power BI?

ZoomCharts is driving innovation in the world of charts and graphs. It’s challenging the very concept of charts by enabling the transition from static data representation to a fully interactive and dynamic user experience. Essentially, charts become alive. Interaction with the charts happens in the most natural way – with a simple click, touch, pinch or swipe. This means that data can be analyzed and presented in a whole new way on any device. ZoomCharts claims that this approach saves time on report generation, presentation and answer seeking, turning data exploration into an engaging experience.

ZoomCharts combines analysis with presentation, making decision making easier than ever.

Three new custom visuals for data presentation and analysis

ZoomCharts has created three custom-visuals for Microsoft Power BI users:

Drill-down donut chart

Designed for exploring multi-level data in depth and across the level of interest.

Try this visual in a Power BI report and get this custom visual from the store.

Start with the overview and drill-down into details with a tap on a slice. Tap in the middle to return to previous level. “Others” slice is dynamic as well - tap to explore.

In this example, we are looking at sales data. With drill-down you can easily see how profits group by industries, company revenue and size.

Drill-down column/line/area chart for category-based data

Designed for exploration and presentation of category-based data.

Try this visual in a Power BI report and get this custom visual& from the store.

Start with the overview and drill-down into details with a tap to expand a column or area of interest. Swipe up to return to the previous level.

In this example we are comparing revenue, cost and profit by product types and billing frequency.

Drill-down column/line/area chart for time-based data

Designed for exploration and presentation of time-based data.

Try this visual in a Power BI report and get this custom visual from the store.

Start with the overview and drill-down into details with a tap. Swipe up or down to zoom in and out. Swipe left or right to pan the timeline. Filter your report by selecting time range on time-axis.

In this example we can see revenue, costs and profits by years. With a touch, you can drill down to month and day level.

Built for productive reports with an engaging cool-factor

As Microsoft Power BI enables filtering through charts, you can combine all three new custom visuals to create even more productive reports. Here is an example of sales data report, where you can see, explore and analyze the sales data by the selected dimensions. Selection of a specific time range in a timeline chart will filter automatically the donut and column charts by the same time range. Similarly, selection of a slice or column will filter automatically the two other charts by the chosen category.

What does this mean for businesses?

With the ever-increasing need to make business-critical decisions, users need to optimize the way they work with reports and dashboards. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, interactive, multi-touch-ready reports and dashboards is becoming a must-have. Successful businesses are able to make better decisions faster, and ZoomCharts in Power BI enable bussiness users to do that.

What does this all mean to you?

Is ZoomCharts here to change the way we work forever? We don’t know that yet. All we know is that ZoomCharts have customers from more than 35 countries worldwide with companies among the Fortune 500.

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Introducing boards in Office Delve—a new way to organize and share work

As written by The Office 365 Team on blogs.office.com

As Office Delve continues to roll out to Office 365 business customers, we love hearing about how people are using this new, innovative experience to discover and explore content that’s relevant to the work they and their teams are doing. Using Office Graph, an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to content and interactions occurring in Office 365, Delve helps you get back to pertinent documents, discover relevant content that has been shared with you, and search for information related to subjects you care about.

Now, we are taking the next step by making it easier to organize all the valuable content that gets surfaced in Delve. We are excited to introduce a new feature in Delve called boards that help you organize content, so it’s readily accessible and easy to share with others.

In Delve, you can use boards to group together and share related documents. For example, you can create a board to collect and organize all documents related to a specific project your team is working on. Everyone in your organization can view and contribute to an existing board or create a board—but they can only see and open documents that they have permission to access.

Take a look at this video to learn how boards helps people organize content from across Office 365:

Add to your boards, discover new ones

When working with others, information tends to get scattered. And that’s OK. Organizing around ideas and topics with boards is easy and powerful. Just click + Add to board, enter a board name or pick from a list of existing boards.

Any card you see in Delve can be added to a board—documents, sites, videos and more.

Boards allow you to discover content related to topics and projects and make it easy to return to the content that matters most to you. From within Delve, you can search for a board, follow it to stay informed and discover other boards—all without having to know or remember where individual pieces of content live.

Your boards are always at hand. Add to your boards, discover new ones or follow them to stay up-to-date.

Collaborative, open gathering of ideas

Every board is a unique collection of ideas and information that others can discover and contribute to. Just as any view within Delve, boards only surface the content you have permissions to see.

Collaborating gets easier too. You simply share the URL of a board with your team, or click Send a link directly from the board, which remains fresh as your team works on and updates those documents over time.

Looking ahead

The journey with boards starts with Delve to help you stay organized as you collaborate on documents and discover new content. Going forward, the “Add to board” functionality will serve as a basis for new content curation and knowledge management scenarios within Office 365, in line with our vision for Next Gen Portals recently outlined with the introduction of Office 365 Video.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]