Microsoft Power BI to improve CDS integration, Office touch points in upcoming releases

Power BI is used by over 150,000 organizations and 2 million developers, Microsoft reports, and the service presents over 45 petabytes of data every month.

As this week's virtual Microsoft Business Applications Summit launched, corporate vice president for BI Arun Ulag identified five areas around the product that the company will be showcasing, some that are going live in the latest release and others that are entering preview.

Power BI will be adding tools for laying out reports for PowerPoint, selecting data with a "lasso" tool, and the ability to apply drop shadows.

Updates to AI capabilities include Q&A improvements around synonyms, suggested questions. And report authors can add "smart narratives" to give end users of reports clear explanations as they explore data.

Microsoft will feature an updated mobile report authoring experience that is still in preview.