Managing row-level security
In Power BI Desktop, you can manage roles and the DAX expression applied to each role by clicking Manage roles under the Modeling tab on the ribbon. In the Power BI service, you can view the row-level security roles that have been created for a dataset by clicking More options under a dataset. From there, select Security on the More options menu.
In the Power BI service, members can be added to the row-level security roles that have been created. Typically, groups of users would be added to each defined role. Row-level security roles can contain groups such as distribution groups, mail-enabled groups, or security groups. Office 365 groups cannot be added. Additionally, it is possible to add specific users to a role as well but as a security best practice the use of groups is advised.
It’s also possible to use a dynamic variable called username() and userprincipalname() with the DAX query of a role. This will be dynamically populated for the user logged in and viewing the report. This corresponds to the DOMAIN\user or user@domain.com value for the current user or viewer of the report.
When it comes to the dynamic capabilities of reporting in Power BI, one of the best features to help with the creation of reports and understanding data models is the Q&A feature, which we’ll look at next.
Applying natural-language Q&A capability
The Q&A feature of Power BI allows you to use natural language to ask a question of the data and return a visual providing the answer. This can be useful when users are learning about the dataset and can also provide a way for less experienced users to build complex visuals.
Q&A is useful for report designers to explore data, create visuals, and build reports in a quick way using natural language. Even for experienced report designers, Q&A provides a way to start with a basic question and then still have the same visuals that could be created manually with the same fine-tuning adjustments possible on the visual after it’s been created by Q&A.
Q&A is also useful for report viewers, allowing them to quickly get to the most important questions they want to ask of the report data. After viewing the Q&A-created visuals, they can easily pin the created visuals to a new or existing (if they have the required permissions) dashboards in the Power BI service.
