Direct Lake Calculated Columns (Preview)
Calculated columns are now available in preview for Direct Lake on OneLake semantic models. This has been one of the most requested capabilities since Direct Lake launched and closes a long-standing gap with Import and DirectQuery storage modes. You can define calculated columns directly in your semantic model using DAX in web modeling and Power BI Desktop, without changing the table storage mode or modifying data upstream. The problem this solves Direct Lake combines Import-like performance with near real-time data freshness by querying Delta tables in OneLake and loading data into memory as needed. But until now, if your model needed a derived column, you had only two options: push the logic upstream into the data source or move the table to a different storage mode. Calculated columns close that gap – you can now define columns directly in the semantic model using DAX without leaving Direct Lake. What you can build Common use cases include: Derived values, such as an age calculated from a birth date. Concatenating fields, such as city and region into a single field for slicers. Formatted dates like Month-Year for grouping in visuals. Multilingual reports using data translations with USERCULTURE(). Personalized content based on functions like USERPRINCIPALNAME(). Examples 1. Age = DATEDIFF( DimCustomer[BirthDate], TODAY(), YEAR ) 2. Customer Location = DimCustomer[CityName] & ", " & DimCustomer[ContinentName] 3. Month Name = FORMAT( DimDate[FirstOfMonth], "mmmm", USERCULTURE() ) The first two return the same value for every user unless security context differs. The third adapts to the language of the person viewing the report – see Month Name. Calculated columns now have a new Expression Context property. Direct Lake calculated columns support User Context expression context only. With User Context: The expression is evaluated when a user queries the model. Evaluation respects row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS). Expressions that do not reference user-aware DAX expressions or secured columns typically return the same value for every user. Considerations: Cannot be used in relationships. Direct Lake calculated columns are evaluated at query time and do not materialize. Because of this, they cannot be used as relationship keys. Build relationship keys in the Delta table when needed. Do not observe filter context. Calculated columns return a fixed value for each row and do not respond to report filters or slicers. Use a measure when the result must change based on report interactions. Unlike standard calculated columns, Direct Lake calculated columns are evaluated in the current user's security context. This means calculations automatically respect RLS and OLS. Security behavior across expression contexts The security difference is easiest to see with a column that references a protected value. Consider a model where OLS hides DimCustomer[Education] from a "NoEducationOLS" role, and a calculated column derived from it: Is Graduate = IF( DimCustomer[Education] = "Graduate Degree", "Yes", "No" ) The result depends on the expression context: Import - Standard Import - User Context Direct Lake - User Context Observes OLS No Yes Yes Result for a restricted user "Yes" or "No", derived from the hidden value Column not available Column not available With Standard, a restricted user still sees the derived answer and the protection is effectively bypassed. With User Context in both Import and Direct Lake, the reference to the secured column is evaluated within the user's security context, so the restricted user does not see the derived column. The sensitive value is never exposed. Import – Standard Expression Context Import – User Context Expression Context Getting Started Calculated columns for Direct Lake are available in preview. Open a Direct Lake on OneLake semantic model in the web or Desktop, create a calculated column, and begin modeling directly in DAX. To learn more, see the Create calculated columns in Power BI Desktop documentation.Modern Power BI architecture choices for reporting on Azure Databricks: A performance benchmark for Power BI storage modes
Many enterprise Power BI semantic models use Azure Databricks as a data source. When building these models, developers and architects face an early and consequential decision: which storage mode to use. Cost, security, and ease of development and tuning all factor in — but report performance is probably the most important of them, because reports that are slow to load are one of the most common causes of end-user dissatisfaction. In practice, that decision is often made on intuition rather than evidence. To help change that, we've published a new white paper, Modern Power BI Architecture Choices for Reporting on Azure Databricks, benchmarking four ways of serving the same Delta tables to a Power BI report: Direct Lake on OneLake — over Delta tables in a Fabric lakehouse or warehouse Direct Lake on mirrored Unity Catalog tables — shortcuts, no copy DirectQuery — on a Databricks SQL warehouse Composite Model on Databricks — DirectQuery combined with Import-mode aggregations Figure: The four Power BI storage modes benchmarked to evaluate their impact on report performance and scalability. What the results suggest: there's no universal winner — but there are clear patterns. Direct Lake on OneLake performed well across the widest range of situations in this benchmark. It's highly competitive at smaller and mid-size volumes, and for the typical Power BI workload — where reports are used repeatedly throughout the day — it delivers interactive performance without extra modeling effort. At the top end of the volume curve, the picture shifts. With billions of rows, a Composite Model with aggregations was the fastest and most consistent pattern, staying sub-100ms on queries the aggregation tables can resolve. The caveat is equally clear: that advantage doesn't extend to queries that fall through to the underlying DirectQuery source, so the payoff depends on how well your aggregations match real user behavior. These are just the headline findings — the detailed results vary considerably by data volume, cache state, filter scenario, and query type. We'd encourage you to read the white paper for the full picture before deciding on a pattern. One thing worth noting up front: this is a point-in-time comparison as of June/July 2026, and both platforms are moving quickly. It also measures the end-user query experience within Power BI, rather than raw database execution speed. Treat it as a guide for running your own testing, on your own data. Explore the white paper for a full walkthrough of through each pattern in detail — the test setup, what was measured, and how results break down by data volume, cache state, and query type. Visit the Power BI download center to access the paper and other related resources.
Power BI September 2025 Feature Summary
The Power BI September 2025 Feature Summary introduces updates for users and coincides with FabCon Vienna! This release introduces several key enhancements, including, updates to Copilot and AI capabilities such as the standalone Copilot default-on experience, and important changes to default visuals like the Bing Maps Visual icon. Dive into the details to discover how these innovations can elevate your Power BI experience. Contents Events and Announcements Get certified in Microsoft Fabric Power BI DataViz World Championships – happening live at FabCon Vienna! Copilot and AI Standalone Copilot to default-on Auto-selection of Copilot workspaces Save Explorations to pro workspaces Find Power BI reports in M365 Copilot search improvements Prep data for AI coming soon to the Power BI service Reporting Enhanced DAX Time Intelligence (Preview) Performance analyzer available when editing a report in the web Translytical Task Flows are now enabled by default in Power BI Modeling Editing semantic models in the Power BI Service (Generally Available) Live editing Direct Lake semantic models with Power BI Desktop (Generally Available) TMDL view (Generally Available) Download PBIX of XMLA altered semantic models Fabric Notebooks for Power BI: Best Practices Analyzer and Memory Analyzer (Generally Available) Direct Lake on OneLake + import in web modeling (Preview) Direct Lake on OneLake + import in Desktop DAX User Defined Functions (Preview) Refresh data or schema options in Power BI Desktop Power BI content shared in Teams now opens in a separate window Mobile NFC tag support in Power BI Mobile (Generally Available) Other New Tenant Setting for Set alert button visibility Visualizations ADWISE Advanced Column v 2.0 Zebra BI Tables: Calculated Reports in One Click and Brand Images Word Cloud by Powerviz Drill Down Combo Bar PRO by ZoomCharts CAGR Arrows Now in Zebra BI Charts Closing Version number: v: 2.147.909.0 Date published: 09/15/2025 Events and Announcements Get certified in Microsoft Fabric Join the thousands of other Fabric users who’ve achieved over 50,000 certifications collectively for the Fabric Analytics Engineers and Fabric Data Engineers roles. To celebrate FabCon Vienna, we are offering the entire Fabric community a 50% discount on exams DP-600, DP-700, DP-900, and PL-300. Request your voucher. Power BI DataViz World Championships – happening live at FabCon Vienna! Four finalists are taking the stage at FabCon to compete for the title of world champion! FabCon Vienna Power BI Dataviz World Championships – and the winner is... Congratulations to Paulo Grijó! Read more about the finals and all four finalists. Copilot and AI Standalone Copilot to default-on The standalone Copilot experience for Power BI, also known as chat with your data—is a full-screen, chat-based AI experience that finds data and answers questions about any report, semantic model, or Fabric data agent you have access to. The standalone Copilot experience will be enabled by default for all tenants where Copilot has already been turned on. If you would like to opt out, If your tenant admin has enabled this setting: Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI—this setting will be automatically enabled in September: Users can access a standalone, cross-item Power BI Copilot experience (preview). We understand that some organizations are still preparing their data for AI and configuring what Copilot can access. You can opt out, here’s how: Turn the setting on in the admin portal, then immediately turn it off. This action tells us that you prefer to enable the standalone Copilot later, and we’ll skip the automatic default-on for your tenant. Auto-selection of Copilot workspaces If you don’t have access to a Fabric Copilot Capacity (FCC), you can still use the standalone Copilot experience. However, you’ll need to manually select a Copilot workspace for billing and usage tracking. This step has caused confusion for many business users, as workspace names, eligibility rules, and billing details are often unfamiliar. Beginning in late September, Copilot will automatically assign a workspace to each user, allowing them to access their environment without additional steps. You will still have full control to change their selection at any time, but the automatic selection will clear a roadblock and make it easier to start getting insights from Copilot. How auto-selection works Smart distribution: We generate a partially randomized list of workspaces, weighted toward those with more available capacity. This helps balance usage and avoids overloading any single capacity. Eligibility check: We’ll pick go down that list and pick a workspace tied to a capacity that meets Copilot requirements (in short, F2 or higher, in a supported region, enabled for use with Copilot). Persistence: Once selected, the workspace stays set across sessions. Fallbacks: If the workspace is later disabled for Copilot, we’ll automatically reassign a new one and alert the user. If an FCC becomes available, it will always override the auto-selected workspace. User control: A dismissible notification will let users know which workspace was chosen, with a direct option to change it. mber_2025_Feature_Summary You can also update it anytime via More > Manage workspace in the standalone Copilot experience. Why this matters This update clears friction for business users who want to use Copilot but don’t know (or need to know) the intricacies of capacities and workspace settings. By auto-selecting a workspace, we help them get straight to the insights they care about—while still giving admins and power users the flexibility to make changes as needed. Save Explorations to pro workspaces Previously, you could only save Explorations to Premium workspaces. Now, you can also save them for Pro workspaces as well. This makes it easier to save and share insights gained during your exploration. Find Power BI reports in M365 In the July 2025 Power BI Feature Summary, we announced the extension of the Power BI and M365 integration to further improve Power BI item discovery and search relevancy in M365 Copilot experiences & Office search. This expansion will empower consumers to locate their Power BI reports and data directly from M365 environments where they already work. Since then, we’ve made significant progress; users can now find Power BI reports by searching for a variety of report content in both Microsoft 365 Search and Copilot. Now, searching for a report title, description, chart title, or other contextual details within the report will display relevant Power BI items in M365, simplifying the process of finding reporting resources for daily data-driven decisions. Search for Power BI items in the M365 Copilot Search Search for Power BI items in the M365 Copilot Chat To learn more about how to share Power BI data with M365 for your organization, refer to the Share data with your Microsoft 365 services documentation. Copilot search improvements Copilot report descriptions make it easier to identify which report can answer your question without needing to open each one for verification. When the report author hasn’t added an item description, Copilot will provide a descriptive caption in Copilot search lists. Search prefers items that have been Prepped for AI. When content creators update the Prepped for AI setting to indicate that a semantic model is ready for use with Copilot, search is now boosting that prepped content (both the model, and all reports that use it). Content that’s ready for Copilot will be preferred in Copilot search over equally relevant Certified & Promoted content. In addition, we’ve sped up the delay in applying the prepped status of the model to the report from 24 hours to under 1 hour (but usually just a few minutes) in most cases. Hints for item types and workspaces, Copilot search returns results that are semantically like your question’s topic, which can be helpful when you don’t quite remember the report’s name. But often we remember other information that could help narrow the search. Copilot can now recognize the key concepts of workspaces and item types, which you can use to guide search. If you’re looking for a semantic model you created ages ago to model effective advertising spend, you might ask: ‘Find semantic models with fields about campaigns, ROI, and impressions'. Or, if you want to prefer content in a particular location, you might say: ‘Summarize quarterly sales, from the workspace East Coast Only’. This won’t act as a strict filter, so if you have a workspace called ‘Excluding East Coast’, you might see results from that workspace because the workspace names are similar. Copilot search responses will now prefer to surface just reports and data agents when the user doesn’t specify. Copilot can still use the report’s semantic model to answer the user's question, but in this way, we’re focusing on items that users are more likely to recognize. Updates to support filter pass-through, you may have already noticed updates in how verified answers show up in our search lists. These changes are purposeful and support Copilot in honoring filter context. For example, when a question about tourism on O’ahu is submitted, it is useful if search indicates that someone has already verified the answer to a similar inquiry. If information is needed for a different island, and that selection is available as a filter in a commonly used report, Copilot can be directed to use that specific report. In the following example, the verified answer is used as a starting point but filtered to directly answer my original question. You can find the filters applied to the visualization. When you use Copilot to search, you'll now see recommendations for what to do next, such as summarizing the report or providing an overview of the key metrics. Learn more about these features and how Copilot search works in the Find content with Power BI Copilot search documentation. Prep data for AI coming soon to the Power BI service In the coming weeks you will be able to prepare your data for AI directly in the Power BI service. Making it easier to keep your semantic models Copilot-ready without switching tools — and it unlocks additional model types you can prepare, including Direct Lake models and more. With prep data for AI features available in the service, you will be able to: Select a Copilot schema Set up and manage Verified Answers Add AI instructions To use these features: In the Power BI service, select the semantic model you want to prep. On the model page, select the Prep data for AI button in the ribbon. When you’re ready, don’t forget to update the model setting so users in your organization can start using Copilot with confidence. Reporting Enhanced DAX Time Intelligence (Preview) A brand new, calendar-based approach to time intelligence in Power BI has arrived! With this update, you can now define custom calendars—such as fiscal years or 4-5-4 retail calendars—directly in your data model. This gives you precise control over how your data maps over time, enabling more accurate and flexible analysis. What’s more, it allows you to do week-based calculations as well! Basic example using a Gregorian calendar How to use calendars to perform a total month-to-date calculation on a Gregorian calendar: To get started, simply turn on the 'Enhanced DAX Time Intelligence' feature in preview settings. Select Calendar options from the context menu on your date table. Create a calendar by associating columns in your date table into categories. Example: The Gregorian Calendar below maps the Year, Quarter, Month, Month of Year and Date categories to primary and associated columns (Columns can be named as desired). Perform calculations based on your calendar. Example: If you have a calendar called ‘Gregorian Calendar’ defined in your model, you can use TOTALMTD to calculate a month-to-date total sales value based on that: Sales MTD = TOTALMTD ( [Total Sales], 'Gregorian Calendar' ) In addition to expanding existing functions with support for calendars, we have also added brand new functions that allow you to do week-based calculations as well, such as TOTALWTD, PREVIOUSWEEK and more. Show your result in a visual. Example: This chart shows the Total Sales and Sales MTD value we calculated previously. Working with fiscal calendars Many calendars, particularly fiscal calendars, are shifted Gregorian calendars, in which the year does not being on January 1 st , but for example on July 1 st . Microsoft is an example of a company that uses a shifted fiscal calendar. In this case, a date table would include columns for the fiscal periods, such as fiscal year, fiscal quarter and fiscal month: Now, you can define a Fiscal Calendar: endar You can use the calendar in our calculations, for example, this calculates the SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR value using the Fiscal Calendar: Sales Same Period Last Fiscal Year = CALCULATE ( [Total Sales], SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR( 'Fiscal Calendar' ) ) This can then be visualized as follows: Week-based calculations As mentioned, you can now also perform week-based calculations, including 454 and other patterns. After making sure your data table contains week information, associate the relevant categories in your calendar as done below for a 454 calendar: Next, create your DAX calculation, for example, a week-to-date calculation can be made using TOTALWTD: Sales WTD 454 = TOTALWTD ( [Total Sales], 'RETAIL-454' ) The column chart shows the actual and the week-to-date sales value based on our RETAIL-454 calendar. There is much more to learn about this feature as it allows for a lot of advanced scenarios. Learn more about this preview in our time intelligence documentation and try it out in your next report and let us know what you think! Performance analyzer available when editing a report in the web Performance analyzer is now available in the web report editing experience and provide information on visual load times. Load times update as you interact with the report. Copy the DAX query from any visual to troubleshoot even further. Previously accessible in Power BI Desktop, this feature now allows users to observe report performance after publication. To learn more, refer to the Use Performance Analyzer to examine report element performance in Power BI Desktop documentation. Translytical Task Flows are now enabled by default in Power BI As a refresher, Translytical task flows, released in May 2025, marked a major evolution in Power BI by allowing users to act on insights instantly without leaving the report. Powered by Fabric User data functions, Translytical task flows allow users to automate tasks such as updating records, dynamic notifications, and even triggering workflows across other systems. To learn more about Translytical task flows, refer to the Understand translytical task flows documentation. Modeling Editing semantic models in the Power BI Service (Generally Available) This milestone unlocks end-to-end Power BI authoring directly in the browser, bringing core modeling parity between the web and Desktop experiences. Yes, that means Mac users can now model in Power BI, no Desktop required! What’s Supported? Create from scratch in the web - You can create net new import semantic models and reports directly in the browser! Navigate to the ‘Create’ page and select ‘Get data’. Choose from over 100 supported connectors to bring in your data, shape it with Power Query, build your semantic model, and design your report. Edit existing semantic models - The Power BI service now offers advanced modeling capabilities, including: Adding new import tables to your model Transforming import tables using the full Power Query editor Refreshing schema and data Managing relationships Writing and editing DAX measures, calculated columns, calculated tables, and calculation groups Editing properties in the properties pane Defining and assigning row-level security roles This release enables core modeling features in both Power BI Desktop and the web, allowing you to build and manage models easily from anywhere. To learn more, refer to the Edit semantic models in the Power BI service documentation, or the Deep Dive into Editing Semantic Models in the Power BI Service (Generally Available) blog post. Live editing Direct Lake semantic models with Power BI Desktop (Generally Available) This capability allows you to use the familiar Power BI Desktop interface to edit Direct Lake semantic models. All processing occurs in your Fabric workspace, directly against OneLake data, using the Power BI Analysis Services engine instead of your local machine. With live edit, every change you make, whether creating new measures, adding calculation groups, defining relationships, running DAX queries, and more, is applied directly to the semantic model in Fabric, ensuring a seamless, scalable modeling experience. Getting started is easy You can begin in Power BI Desktop or from the web: Start from Desktop Open the ‘OneLake data hub’ in Power BI Desktop. Select your Direct Lake semantic model. From the ‘Connect’ button drop-down, select ‘Edit’. Start from the web: In the web experience, select ‘Edit in Desktop’ for the Direct Lake semantic model you have opened. This will launch Power BI Desktop with the semantic model ready for editing. To learn more, refer to the Direct Lake in Power BI Desktop documentation, or the blog post. TMDL view (Generally Available) TMDL view introduces a modern code-first editing experience for Power BI semantic models using the Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL). A user-oriented modeling language designed to enhance transparency, governance, and efficiency in the development of semantic models. With TMDL view, you can easily make batch updates using simple find-and-replace operations or leverage your preferred generative AI tool to create or modify TMDL code at scale. General availability introduces several notable enhancements: Full code highlighting including DAX and M (Power Query) Execution status in the script tabs For more information about TMDL view and full list of capabilities, please refer to our Work with TMDL view in Power BI Desktop (preview) documentation. Download PBIX of XMLA altered semantic models A key goal of the TMDL view work was to ensure Power BI Desktop can reliably handle any semantic model configuration. If the model is valid in Analysis Services in a Fabric workspace, it can be opened and edited in Power BI Desktop without crashing. Semantic model metadata not accessible through the user interface - such as multiple table partitions - can still be edited using TMDL view. Previously, users could use the XMLA endpoint with external tools to make semantic model changes - such as creating multiple partitions - that were supported by Fabric but not by Power BI Desktop. This mismatch often caused Power BI Desktop to crash, which is why downloads were blocked for XMLA altered semantic models. Now that TMDL view is generally available, we’ve removed this limitation. You can now download PBIX files for semantic models modified through the XMLA endpoint, and open and edit them in Power BI Desktop. This update does not mean that all semantic models are now downloadable as PBIX files. For example, semantic models with incremental refresh partitions are still not supported for download, this will be addressed in a future update. For more details on PBIX download limitations, please refer to our Limitations when downloading a report .pbix file documentation. This feature is currently rolling out and may not be fully available in all regions or for all users yet. We appreciate your patience as we complete the deployment over the coming weeks. To learn more, refer to the Open and edit any semantic model with Power BI tools blog post. Fabric Notebooks for Power BI: Best Practices Analyzer and Memory Analyzer (Generally Available) These one-click experiences make it easy to use Fabric Notebooks and Semantic Link to analyze your semantic models directly on the web. Best Practice Analyzer evaluates models using more than 60 rules across five categories: performance, DAX expressions, error prevention, maintenance, and formatting. It provides guidance on design and performance based on these criteria. Memory Analyzer provides detailed memory and storage statistics for tables, columns, hierarchies, partitions, and relationships, helping you identify optimization opportunities. We would like to give a special shoutout to the Power BI community members whose contributions laid the foundation for these tools: Daniel Otykier – creator of Best Practice Analyzer in Tabular Editor Marco Russo – developer of VertiPaq Analyzer Michael Kovalsky – builder of semantic link labs powering these notebooks Explore the Power BI Community Notebooks Gallery to discover and share notebooks that enhance data analysis and reporting with the Power BI Community. Learn more about using notebooks with your Power BI semantic models including details on this feature and its limitations in the Use notebooks with a semantic model documentation. Direct Lake on OneLake + import in web modeling (Preview) Semantic models edited in web modeling now have full flexibility of both Direct Lake on OneLake and import table storage modes. Open a semantic model with either Direct Lake tables or import tables and add in additional tables from either storage mode. Choose Get Data to add in import tables from any of the 100s of connectors supported. Choose OneLake catalog and add in Direct Lake tables from any of the Fabric data sources you have access to, including Lakehouses, Warehouses, Mirrored databases, Mirrored Azure Databricks catalogs, and SQL databases in Fabric. Summary Once in import storage mode you can transform the table further in Power Query and add in calculated columns to get your reporting where it needs to be. Hierarchies added to import tables also can be used in Analyze in Excel. To learn more, refer to the Direct Lake overview documentation. Direct Lake on OneLake + import in Desktop Power BI Desktop can also live edit semantic models with both Direct Lake and import tables. Edit relationships, add measures, and adjust column and table properties right in Power BI Desktop. To learn more, refer to the Direct Lake overview documentation. DAX User Defined Functions (Preview) Power BI has long supported custom functions in Power Query, however now DAX User Defined Functions (UDFs) provide similar capabilities. DAX UDFs allow you to define custom functions with parameters, just like you would define functions or methods in programming. Instead of copy-pasting chunks of logic across multiple measures, you can now write your logic once and reuse it everywhere. Complex problems can be encapsulated by multiple reusable functions. Functions can even refer to other functions! This way, your logic becomes easier to write, understand, maintain and debug. Whether you are working on complex models or just want cleaner, more maintainable code, DAX UDFs are for you. Up to this point, the reusability of DAX logic was limited to calculation groups. DAX UDFs, however, unlike calculation groups, can be parameterized. Getting started with DAX UDFs To get started, simply turn on the ‘DAX User Defined Functions’ feature in the preview settings. You can define DAX UDFs in multiple ways, including the DAX Query View and TMDL view. Defining and using a function Defining a function is straightforward as we have introduced a new FUNCTION keyword. The general structure for defining a function is: /// [function description] FUNCTION <FunctionName> = ( [parameter name] : [parameter type] ) => <body> For example, here is a DAX query that defines and evaluates an extremely simple function that applies a 10% tax to an amount. DEFINE /// AddTax returns the amount including tax FUNCTION AddTax = (amount) => amount * 1.1 EVALUATE { AddTax(11) } // Return 11 After adding the function to the model, you can then call the function from other places where you can use DAX, such as measures: Parameters Just like built-in functions, DAX UDFs can take zero or more parameters. You can also provide the type of the parameter, so your functions are much more resilient. For example, to identify that our AddTax function expects a numerical value, we could write. DEFINE /// AddTax returns the amount including tax FUNCTION AddTax = (amount: numeric) => amount * 1.1 Parameters can not only take scalar values but also accept tables and even expressions. Type checking To make DAX and TMDL/TMSL more consistent, we have introduced a set of new functions to do type checking and updated the DATATABLE, CONVERT and EXTERNALMEASURE functions have been updated to work with all synonyms as well. For example, we now have added ISSTRING, which is an alternative to, ISTEXT and ISNUMERIC which is a complement to ISNUMBER. A complete list is available in our documentation. Managing DAX UDFs Functions are shown in the model explorer: In DAX Query View, we even added quick queries, so it’s even easier to define and evaluate existing functions or write a brand new one. The possibilities are endless DAX UDFs open a whole new spectrum of options, and this blog cannot do it justice. We encourage you to enable the preview today and try it out for yourself. Read more in the Power BI DAX User Data Functions documentation. Please let us know what you think. We are looking forward to seeing all the creative uses of UDFs! Refresh data or schema options in Power BI Desktop When you select ‘Refresh’ in Power BI Desktop, it always performs a schema sync first, followed by a data refresh. While this behavior is convenient in most cases, there are scenarios where you may want to refresh the data without updating the model schema, even if the data source has changed its schema. For example, in Direct Lake semantic models, the underlying Lakehouse table might have changed (e.g., a new column added). You may want the latest data but prefer not to bring new columns into the model. With this month's update, you now have more control over the refresh operation. You can choose to: Sync schema only – Updates the semantic model to reflect the data source structure (e.g., column type changes or new columns). Refresh data only – Loads fresh data while preserving the current schema in your semantic model. These options are also available when you refresh tables individually in the data pane: This added flexibility helps you manage your models refresh operations more intentionally, based on your specific needs. For more information about Power BI Desktop refresh, refer to the Data refresh in Power BI documentation. Power BI content shared in Teams now opens in a separate window In this month's update, when you open a Power BI item which was shared with you in Teams chat or channel, it now opens in separate window—so your chat and other Teams apps stay exactly where you left them. Previously, opening an item from a Power BI preview card would replace your Teams chat, making multitasking difficult. With this update, items shared in a chat open in a separate window, while your original chat remains visible in a collapsible side panel. You are now able to access data, maintain ongoing conversations, and utilize additional Teams applications simultaneously. Figure - A user selects 'Open' on a Power BI report preview card within a Teams chat. The report launches in a separate Teams window, while the original chat remains accessible in a collapsible side pane. To learn more about Power BI preview cards in Teams, refer to the Link preview cards in Microsoft Teams chats and channels documentation. Mobile NFC tag support in Power BI Mobile (Generally Available) Imagine being able to access your important data just by tapping your device on a small tag. That’s the power of NFC (Near Field Communication) tags. NFC Tag Support is now generally available in the Power BI Mobile app on supported devices! This feature allows you to register and read Power BI items such as reports, scorecards, dashboards, or even a set of items like an app or workspace on NFC tags directly from the app. With NFC you can create a seamless connection between your data and the physical world. For example, a retail manager could quickly access inventory data by tapping their phone on an NFC tag placed on a storage shelf. This feature is especially useful for frontline workers who need quick access to data while managing retail floors, inventory, or manufacturing processes. Getting started is easy: open the Power BI Mobile app, navigate to the item you want to register, press the Register to NFC button in the 3 dots menu, and follow the prompts to link it to an NFC tag. Once you’ve registered your desired item to the tag, anyone with the Power BI Mobile app can get to the item simply by tapping the tag with their device, whether the app is open or not. If the user doesn’t have permission to access the item, they’ll be taken to the request access flow. NFC tags are affordable, flexible, durable, and reliable, and can easily be reused. To learn more about NFC support in Power BI mobile, refer to the Connect data to physical locations with NFC tags documentation. Other New Tenant Setting for Set alert button visibility A new tenant setting, all Power BI users can see ‘Set alert’ button to create Fabric Activator alerts, is rolling out this week. This setting will give admins more control over which users can view the Set alert button, which allows users to create Fabric Activator alerts on their visuals, sending real-time notifications based on predefined data conditions. When enabled, all Power BI users will see the ‘Set alert’ button in reports. When the setting is turned off, the button will only be visible to users with tenant-level Fabric access, which was the group of users who could see the button prior to this change. Regardless of whether the setting is turned on or off, only users with permission to create Fabric items can set up Fabric Activator alerts. The benefit of turning this setting on is that it allows users for whom Fabric was enabled for only specific capacities to also set alerts, unlocking the power of real-time alerting for more Power BI users. This setting is currently disabled and will be turned on by default the week of October 13th. Visualizations ADWISE Advanced Column v 2.0 Advanced Column is easy to use column chart for comparing one or more values with clearly interpretable difference lines. It is best suited for comparison of values between time periods, categories or quantities. This visual presents the following features: Chart types - stacked, clustered and nested/chimney charts in one visual. Difference lines – lines to clearly show difference above compared columns with values in specific shapes, all configurable (percentage/absolute difference, colors, borders, rounded corners, lines share starts/ends). Top N selection Built in – Easily display key data by selecting the Top N columns or Top N segments within each column + the "rest" part of the data. Total Column - It is not necessary to display separate KPIs for totals, as the Total column is already included in the chart. User controls – Enable/disable viewer change of Top selections (how many to show, highest/lowest) and Total Column calculation. Enable and Add Icons – Icons make charts easier to read by visually representing column categories, you can add icons directly in the visual using the built-in icon picker. And other formatting - Axis Y break, thousand and decimal separator, interaction with other visuals, empty data screen, animations, gradient background, shadows, transparency. Try from AppSource. Zebra BI Tables: Calculated Reports in One Click and Brand Images The latest update to Zebra BI Tables introduces two powerful features that streamline report building and enhance data storytelling: row calculations from the data model and brand images in rows. Check out the demo video: Zebra BI May 2025 Update: One Click P&L and Brand Logos in Zebra BI Tables With the new zero-click reporting functionality, users can now define calculation logic (such as invert, result, skip) directly in the Power BI data model. Simply add a column to your dataset, define the logic with symbols (“=” (Result), “/” (Skip), “-” (Invert)), and with a single drag and drop add it to Zebra BI Tables. The column values will automatically be applied as calculations on the visual, eliminating the need for additional manual setup. It makes the creation of reports like P&Ls, balance sheets, inventory tracking, SaaS metrics, or sales dashboards dramatically faster and more accurate. Zebra BI Tables now also supports adding brand images instead of row labels. Especially valuable for consumer goods and retail companies, this feature makes reports more intuitive and engaging. By instantly recognizing brand logos, end users grasp insights faster and spend less time searching for context. These updates contribute to: Massive time savings. Error reduction. Standardized reporting across teams. Simplify your reporting with Zebra BI Tables and share your feedback. Word Cloud by Powerviz The new Word Cloud by Powerviz is available, an advanced visual which empowers you to create some of the most high-quality and creative word art in the Power BI. Key Features: Word Styling: Make your word clouds pop with personalized text styles. It offers font styling, direction & text editing features. Color Options: Choose from 30+ color palettes, including color-blind safe options. Shapes: Create eye-catching word clouds by selecting or uploading images. Exclude: Easily remove unnecessary words and symbols from the text to produce a clean and focused word cloud. Ranking: Filter out Top/Bottom N Words. Conditional Formatting: Easily spot words with dynamic rules. Lasso/Reverse Lasso: Select or deselect multiple words with ease. Grid View: Switch to an interactive table with sort, filter, and search features. Show Condition: Dynamically show or hide the visual based on conditions. Ideal for marketing, education, market research, and presentations—use it for sentiment analysis, SEO keywords, brainstorming, surveys, and engaging communication. Try Word Cloud visual for FREE from AppSource Check out all features of the visual: Demo_file Step-by-step instructions: Documentation YouTube Video: Video_Link Learn more about visuals: https://powerviz.ai/ Follow Powerviz: https://lnkd.in/gN_9Sa6U Drill Down Combo Bar PRO by ZoomCharts What makes Drill Down Combo Bar PRO the best custom visual for visualizing categorical data? It’s all about the drill downs – in Combo Bar PRO, you can create a hierarchy of up to nine category fields, and users can easily drill down by clicking directly on data. Deeper, more focused insights, but only when the user needs them. The visual is designed to provide top-notch user experience: the slick and intuitive on-chart interactions, the smooth animations, the seamless cross-filtering with other visuals, and full touch support all make Combo Bar PRO a crucial addition to your next report. And the best part? Combo Bar PRO supports up to 25 series, and each series can be visualized as bars, lines or areas. With a wide variety of customization options, you can create the perfect chart for your use case. We also recently published a guide on how to create different types of stacked charts with Combo & Combo Bar PRO, including stacked bar, stacked & clustered bar, bar & line, nested bar chart and more. For a more details, refer to our blog - Power BI Stacked Column Charts: A Full Guide! Get Drill Down Combo Bar PRO CAGR Arrows Now in Zebra BI Charts Compare multi-year trends across business units, products, or regions — instantly. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is a critical metric for visualizing growth trends in financial analysis, strategic planning, and performance comparison. Now available in Zebra BI Charts for Power BI, CAGR arrows make it easier than ever to communicate multi-year trends directly within your reports. They are especially useful in dashboards that track long-term results, helping users highlight growth patterns and shifts over time. When used in small multiples, CAGR arrows allow immediate comparison of performance across regions, product lines, or business units — all while maintaining a shared Y-axis for IBCS-compliant reporting. Each CAGR label includes a color-coded action dot — green for growth, red for negative — with the size scaled to reflect magnitude, offering an intuitive visual cue for trend strength. To simplify reporting even further, Zebra BI Charts automatically calculates the CAGR based on your underlying data. CAGR provides a smoothed view of performance over time, helping teams refine growth targets, align KPIs, and deliver executive ready insights with clarity and impact. To learn more, refer to Introducing CAGR arrows in Zebra BI Charts. Closing This concludes this month’s update. We hope the information provided in this update is useful. If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store, please leave us a review. As always, keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next. We are looking forward to hearing from you!Power BI October 2025 Feature Summary
This month's update brings exciting opportunities for learning and community engagement, including the upcoming Fabric Data Days and the return of FabCon in Atlanta next spring. Notably, Power BI is making strides in mapping capabilities by transitioning from Bing Maps to Azure Maps, ensuring users have access to the latest features and support. Dive into the details to stay informed about what's new and what's ahead for Power BI. Contents Events & Announcements Fabric Data Days are Coming! FabCon is back from March 16-20, 2026, in Atlanta, GA General Bing Map deprecation plan & Update in Power BI Copilot and AI Copilot to write DAX queries in DAX query view (Generally Available) Reporting Button slicer (Generally Available) Visual calculations are now supported in embed for your customers (Preview) Automatically expand table columns to fill available space Introducing the new Power BI Controller in Power BI in PowerPoint (Preview) Performance analyzer in web to see the load times of visuals Data connectivity Export Query Results (Preview) Other Power BI Desktop is now supported on ARM Visualizations Sankey Chart by Powerviz Your Timeline Slicer: Reimagining Date Filtering for Modern Dashboards Drill Down Scatter PRO by ZoomCharts Multiple Sparklines Performance Bar by JTA Financial Reporting Matrix v8.2 BI Pixie by DataChant - Measure the Effectiveness of Your BI Assets in 6 Dimensions from Adoption to Security Events & Announcements Fabric Data Days are Coming! Take your Power BI skills to the next level and join us for 2 months of learning, contests, live sessions, discount exam vouchers and community connection. Sign up for our live session series to stay connected – it all kicks off on November 4 th . FabCon is back from March 16-20, 2026, in Atlanta, GA Join us for the ultimate Power BI, Microsoft Fabric SQL, Real-Time Intelligence, AI, and Databases community-led event. The third annual FabCon Americas will feature sessions from your favorite Microsoft and community speakers, keynotes, more opportunities to Ask the Experts for 1:1 support, an engaging community lounge with opportunities to network and connect with your peers, a dedicated partner pre-day, a packed expo hall, Power Hour, Data Viz World Championship, and a can’t-miss attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium. Register with code FABCOMM to save $200. General Bing Map deprecation plan & Update in Power BI To ensure a seamless experience and stay ahead of upcoming Microsoft’s plan to retire Bing Maps for Enterprise, Power BI is proactively transitioning from Bing Maps to Azure Maps. By making this change early, Power BI users will benefit from enhanced mapping capabilities and long-term support. We encourage customers to begin updating their reports to Azure Maps visuals to stay future ready. Power BI Desktop and Web (Edit- mode) Earlier, we shared plans to remove the Bing Maps icon from the Visualization pane. After reconsideration, we’ve decided to keep the icon visible for now to ensure continuity and minimize disruption. Please note that the Bing Maps visual is still slated for deprecation, and we’re currently discussing the timeline. Any existing Bing Maps already in your reports will still be available. In preparation for the upcoming change, upgrade to Azure Maps unless: You have team members who would consume the report in China, Korea, or government clouds. You're physically located in China or Korea (regardless of where your home tenant is located). You're part of a government cloud. We're working to support Azure Maps in these unsupported regions. If you and all report users are in a supported region, you're encouraged to start using Azure Maps now. Learn how to upgrade to Azure Maps. To see the list of supported regions, see Azure Maps service geographic scope. For more information about Azure Maps, see Get started with Azure Maps Power BI visual. Power BI Report Builder The migration of paginated reports map visuals from Bing Maps to Azure Maps has begun. This migration will occur in two phases: first, migrating to Azure Maps in PBIRB, followed by migration to Azure Maps for paginated reports in the service. The initial phase is complete. Beginning with the September release of PBIRB, users can create map visuals powered by Azure Maps by default. However, paginated reports published in the service will continue to use Bing Maps until phase two is completed. Phase two is expected to be completed by mid-November. Paginated reports authors can revert to Bing Maps for authoring in PBIRB until both phases are complete. To enable this, users must set the ‘RevertToBingMaps’ registry key located in the ‘Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Power BI Report Builder’ folder to 1. If the ‘Microsoft Power BI Report Builder’ folder does not exist, it should be manually created before setting the registry key. Copilot and AI Copilot to write DAX queries in DAX query view (Generally Available) This innovative capability empowers users to leverage Copilot assistance directly within both the web and Desktop Power BI experiences, making DAX query creation easier and more efficient than ever before. Getting started is simple. In Power BI Desktop or Power BI web modeling, open the DAX query view and select the Copilot button. Describe the insights you are seeking, and Copilot generates the corresponding DAX query. Conversationally edit the DAX query with Copilot, run it as you go, and keep it when you are ready. The following screenshot shows Copilot helping to write a DAX query from the prompt ‘How are we tracking towards our targeted deliveries for each month?’ in DAX query view of Power BI Desktop. The DAX query results show by month the number of deliveries made, the target, attainment %, and variance to target. The next screenshot demonstrates how to write a DAX query to answer the user prompt ‘Can you indicate which month we were over target or under target on deliveries?’ in DAX query view of Power BI web modeling. The DAX query results show by month the number of deliveries made, the target, variance to target, and the status of each month as over or under target. Copilot is grounded in the semantic model, and AI instructions set on the model by Prep for AI. This includes verified answers by understanding the fields used and filters applied. Semantic model tables, columns, descriptions, display folders, hierarchy information, relationships, and measures are all known already to Copilot when creating DAX queries. Copilot to help write DAX queries is used in DAX query view, and in chat with your data experiences when a DAX query is returned as well as data agents when a semantic model is included. To learn more, refer to the Write DAX queries with Copilot documentation, and try it out today! Reporting Button slicer (Generally Available) Along with this release, we’ve added a few exciting enhancements to make your experience even better, including Cross-highlighting, Auto grid, and more. Cross-highlighting Like the Chiclet slicer, the Button Slicer now supports cross-highlighting to help you uncover deeper insights. This means the slicer can interact dynamically with other visuals on your report page by emphasizing relevant values and dimming unrelated ones. For example: If you select North America in a column chart, the Button Slicer will: Highlight buttons like Canada and United States (since they belong to North America). Dim all other countries to indicate they are outside the selection but keep them visible. To use this feature, simply drag a field into this new field, well called ‘Highlight label’ in the Build visual pane. You can now start interacting with now by simply selecting a value on a visual. For example, in the below example if you click on District L1-04 in the scatter chart, you will see the DM of the district L1-04 highlighted while other values are dimmed in the button slicer. Auto grid With the new Auto grid option turned on, your slicer layout becomes smarter. When enabled (and it is by default), the arrangement of rows and columns automatically adjusts based on a defined maximum limit, ensuring a clean and responsive design without manual effort. For example, following is the screenshot with Rows set to 5 and Columns set to 3 and Auto grid on: Auto grid With the new Auto grid option turned on, your slicer layout becomes smarter. When enabled (and it is by default), the arrangement of rows and columns automatically adjusts based on a defined maximum limit, ensuring a clean and responsive design without manual effort. For example, following is the screenshot with Rows set to 5 and Columns set to 3 and Auto grid on: Following is the screenshot with Auto grid Off: In addition to these updates, we’ve introduced several accessibility improvements to make Button Slicer more user-friendly and inclusive. To learn more about these enhancements and how to use them effectively, refer to the Create a button slicer (preview) documentation. Visual calculations are now supported in embed for your customers (Preview) Visual calculations are now supported in Power BI Embedded—specifically in the Embed for your customers scenario. This powerful enhancement brings even more flexibility and intelligence to your embedded analytics solutions. With visual calculations, users, developers and ISVs can now define custom calculations directly within visuals, without needing to modify the underlying data model or write complex DAX. This means faster iteration, more dynamic insights, and a smoother experience for end users. You can also hide/unhide fields on visual and set visual-level format strings. Automatically expand table columns to fill available space We’ve added a new option to table formatting that makes your visuals look cleaner and more balanced—automatically. With ‘Grow to fit’, any extra space in the visual is evenly distributed across existing columns when the total column width is smaller than the visual container. No more manual resizing to fill the gap. If your table isn't using the full visual width, you can manually resize columns or use Auto-size width, but now there's an improved solution. For example, this table doesn't fully utilize the available space: Navigate to the format pane under Column headers > Options, toggle Auto-size width to ‘On’, and set ‘Resize behavior’ to ‘Grow to fit’. Instantly, your table expands to make full use of the available space. The additional available space will be distributed across the columns: It’s a subtle upgrade that makes your data layouts cleaner, more balanced, and easier to read. Note that this will not interfere with any adjustments you make to column widths: once a column width is manually adjusted, it won’t be automatically expanded. Introducing the new Power BI Controller in Power BI in PowerPoint (Preview) This feature was developed in direct response to feedback from our user community and is designed to provide an efficient tool for managing multiple Power BI add-ins within PowerPoint presentations. Users can embed interactive reports and visuals into PowerPoint, supporting data-driven presentations across organizations. As adoption has grown, many of you expressed the need for a centralized mechanism to manage and update several Power BI add-ins across multiple slides. You told us that you are using Power BI add-in for PowerPoint to create data-centric presentations, which you are updating every week or month, and that going over all the add-ins in the presentation and repeating the same operation is time consuming. The Power BI Controller addresses this need by allowing users to execute bulk operations from a single interface. The Power BI Controller is a task pane add-in that serves as a central command center for all Power BI add-ins within a presentation. To get this add-in go to ‘Add-ins’ in PowerPoint ribbon and search for ‘Microsoft Power BI Controller’. Select ‘Add’ to add-in to your ribbon. Once you select it, a new panel will open with the list of commands that you can apply. Pick the command you wish to run and click ‘Apply’. This will trigger the discovery phase in which the controller will look for all Power BI content in the presentation and next the selected command will be executed on the discovered Power BI add-ins. To learn more, refer to View and Present live Power BI Data in PowerPoint. Performance analyzer in web to see the load times of visuals In September, we announced the availability of a performance analyzer pane on the web to see the load times of the visuals in your report where your users are going to be viewing it. Unfortunately, the rollout was delayed. This functionality will be available to your tenant in the next few weeks. To learn more about this new capability while editing a report in web, refer to the Use Performance Analyzer to examine report performance documentation. Data connectivity Export Query Results (Preview) Export Query Results in Power BI Desktop unlocks seamless data portability and collaboration across Microsoft Fabric. This feature empowers analysts to take transformed, cleaned data from Power Query and export it directly to trusted destinations - such as Dataflows Gen2, Lakehouses, and other cloud stores - without relying on complex workarounds or third-party tools. By meeting users where they work (Power BI Desktop) it reduces duplication of effort, accelerates data sharing, and drives interoperability across Fabric workloads. To enable this feature, select the Preview feature settings in Power BI Desktop. Users can select export query results from the PQ ribbon, Select an online destination, And export their queries to this destination, where they can choose to modify the Dataflow. The result is improved data gravity in OneLake, streamlined refresh and monitoring capabilities, and a minimal-click experience that supports both new and existing destinations. Ultimately, this feature bridges the gap between desktop analytics and enterprise-scale data integration, enabling organizations to maximize the value of their data investments. To learn more about how to use this feature: Export Query Results in Power BI Desktop | Microsoft Learn. Other Power BI Desktop is now supported on ARM Power BI Desktop is now supported on Windows on ARM PCs that have the 2025-09 Cumulative Update installed (KB5065789). Adding ARM support to Power BI Desktop brings powerful data analytics capabilities to a broader range of hardware—unlocking faster performance, improved battery life, and seamless experiences on modern, energy-efficient devices. Why ARM? As more users adopt ARM-powered laptops and tablets for their portability and efficiency, it’s essential that Power BI keeps pace. ARM support ensures smoother operation, better resource utilization, and a future-ready foundation for data professionals working across diverse environments. Whether you're building dashboards on the go or analyzing data from anywhere, Power BI Desktop on ARM makes it easier than ever. Visualizations Sankey Chart by Powerviz The Powerviz Sankey Chart is a dynamic flow diagram that visualizes the proportional movement of data, resources, or processes across categories or stages. With weighted connections and flexible layouts, it helps users uncover insights within complex systems. Key Features Chart Orientation: Switch seamlessly between vertical and horizontal orientation. Node Customizations: Control node appearance, spacing, visibility, and interactions for optimal clarity. Multi-Level Support: Add multiple levels to visualize layered, hierarchical flows. Data Colors: Access 30+ color palettes, including colour-blind-safe options. Fill Patterns: Highlight nodes with patterns or upload your own. Conditional Formatting: Highlight outliers with based on measures or categories rules. Smart Labels: Display data and header labels for enhanced readability. Hide Null Nodes: Instantly remove nodes with null or blank data. Image Labels: Add image URLs to show visuals inside or outside the nodes. Import/Export: Save and reuse themes easily. Templates: Use built-in templates or design your own. Other features included are Sorting, Ranking, Show Condition, Grid View and more. Business Use Cases Customer Journey Mapping, Expense Breakdown, Supply Chain Flow. Try Sankey Chart visual for FREE from AppSource Check out all features of the visual: Demo_file Step-by-step instructions: Documentation YouTube Video: Video_Link Learn more about visuals: https://powerviz.ai/ Follow Powerviz: https://lnkd.in/gN_9Sa6U Your Timeline Slicer: Reimagining Date Filtering for Modern Dashboards What problem are we solving? Dashboard real estate is precious, but traditional timeline slicers often consume too much space while lacking the flexibility today's data professionals need. After experiencing firsthand the limitations and occasional bugs of existing solutions, we built Your Timeline Slicer from the ground up to deliver what the Power BI community has been asking for. Why Your Timeline Slicer changes the game Our visual combines the familiar timeline functionality you know with breakthrough space-saving design - reclaiming up to 60% more dashboard space through ultra-compact mode. Beyond size, we have intelligent features that make reporting effortless: dynamic ‘Current Period’ and ‘Latest Available’ filtering that automatically focuses on what matters most, extensive customization options to match any brand or style, and rock-solid performance. Whether you're building executive summaries, financial dashboards, or mobile-first reports, Your Timeline Slicer adapts to your workflow - not the other way around. Ready to experience the difference? Download Your Timeline Slicer from AppSource and discover how smart date filtering can transform your dashboards. Based On Website Drill Down Scatter PRO by ZoomCharts What if exploring complex data was as easy as scrolling a smartphone app? You could make smarter and more interactive reports that allow more people (managers, C-suite, and other stakeholders) to take part in data analysis themselves and quickly find the insights they need for data-driven decisions. When designing our Drill Down Scatter PRO, we focused on three things: Incredible user experience: Freeform panning. Click to drill down. Scroll or pinch to zoom in. Multiple ways to select data. Scatter PRO makes it easy for anyone to navigate even the most complex data. On-chart Drill Down: Have hundreds or even thousands of markers? No problem – you can simplify your chart by using multiple category fields and combine smaller data points into large markers. Simply click on it to drill down and see more detailed insights on-demand. Customization: Scatter PRO offers all the necessary tools to create the perfect scatter plot for your report. Regression lines, marker, label, legend customization, tooltip content fields, reference lines and areas, and even shaded areas at your selected coordinates! Read more in our blog article. Get Drill Down Scatter PRO Multiple Sparklines With the Multiple Sparklines visual, you can design an Income Statement that is both insightful and visually compelling. 1st column displays Profit and Loss as a waterfall chart. 2nd column shows each item as a percentage of Revenue (common-size analysis). The 3rd column presents the past five-year trend. 4th column compares each item with the previous year. The 5th column benchmarks result against two major competitors. For a step-by-step tutorial on how to create this type of Income Statement, visit: Income Statement in Power BI Following is another example of an Income Statement Download this visual from APPSOURCE For more information visit https://www.excelnaccess.com/sparklines/ or contact [email protected] Performance Bar by JTA Take your Power BI dashboards to the next level with the Performance Bar by JTA, a clean visual for tracking progress and status briefly. Categories are displayed as streamlined horizontal bars with an optional markers and value label, making comparisons effortless. With simple customization to match your theme - and an optional total bar - it delivers a clear, modern way to tell your performance story. Key Features Bar customization: Configure bar height, colors, borders, and background to match your report theme. Flexible labelling: Show or hide individual labels and choose their position for clear, uncluttered reading. Adjustable scale: Change the scale to emphasize what matters most. Marker styling: Personalize circle markers (size, color, border) for highlights and targets. Marker styling: Personalize circle markers (size, color, border) for highlights and targets. Total Bar: Optionally display a summary bar for an at-a-glance overall view. Configurable tooltips: Define exactly which fields appear and where tooltips show up. Subtle animation: Bring bars to life with a clean growth animation. Resources Explore more here. Also, if you want to download it, you can find the visual package on the AppSource. Financial Reporting Matrix v8.2 More control, customization, and clarity The Financial Reporting Matrix just got even better! With version 8.2.0.0, we’ve introduced powerful new features, expanded customization options, and refined the user experience to give report creators unprecedented control over their layouts, formatting, and interactivity. New in v8.2 RowHeaderParent() function – Reference parent rows in calculations and formatting. Invert Sign Factor – Quickly reverse value signs for reporting preferences. Row options in Conditional Formatting – make rules based on Inverted sign, allow drilling, and more. Comments everywhere – Add and format comments on row and column headers, and export to Excel with comments. Custom expansion icons – Change shape, color, size, and indentation. Pin Columns – Keep important columns visible when scrolling. Improvements Column header names showing in stepped layout. Hide empty rows with rendered measures in rows. JSON-based row options recognition. Smoother horizontal scroll for formula editing. Row subtotals fix for ‘In rows’ measure placement. Rename your Applied Steps. Change column expansion icon size. Get the latest version from AppSource BI Pixie by DataChant - Measure the Effectiveness of Your BI Assets in 6 Dimensions from Adoption to Security Since its launch 2024, BI Pixie has evolved from its initial adoption and engagement measurement offering an all-encompassing intelligence suite for organizations that want to maximize their return on investment in Power BI. BI Pixie now offers insights in six key dimensions: Adoption, Engagement, User Satisfaction, Business Outcome, Performance and Security. Here are the recent updates and new capabilities in BI Pixie. With its unique instrumentation technology, BI Pixie captures detailed auditing information, providing a comprehensive view of your BI audience and analytic assets. Designed to ensure your data stays in your organization and scale to tens of thousands of reports and users, BI Pixie can be deployed in your Azure tenant or Power Platform environment in minutes. Leverage the capabilities of BI Pixie to drive user adoption, reduce attrition, boost your data governance and optimize the impact of your BI initiatives with our unprecedented auditing and real-time detection of data leaks due to faulty implementations of Row-Level Security (RLS). Discover more by exploring BI Pixie Dashboard on Microsoft AppSource, and reach out for a free subscription. Closing This concludes this month’s update. We hope the information provided in this update is useful. If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store, please leave us a review. As always, keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next. We are looking forward to hearing from you!Power BI November 2025 Feature Summary
The November 2025 Power BI feature update brings several important announcements and enhancements across the platform. Key highlights include the deprecation of R and Python visuals in the Embed for your customers solution, significant updates to Copilot and AI capabilities—such as the standalone Copilot in Power BI mobile apps (Preview) and improvements to Verified Answers—and new options for reporting, modeling, and data connectivity. Users will also notice advancements in visualizations, with features like automatically expanding matrix columns and a generally available Card visual, as well as expanded support for Spark and Impala connectors and enhancements to image visuals and the OneLake Catalog. This summary provides an overview of these impactful changes to help you leverage the latest innovations in Power BI. Contents Events and Announcements Fabric Data Days is on now! FabCon is back from March 16-20, 2026, in Atlanta, GA Copilot and AI Ask anything, anywhere with Standalone Copilot in Power BI mobile apps (Preview) Updates to the standalone Copilot in Power BI Improvements to Verified Answers Remote Power BI Model Context Protocol Server for chat with your Data (Preview) Reporting Automatically expand matrix columns to fill available space Card visual (Generally Available) Enhancing Image visuals with styling, states, and more OneLake Catalog now supports user data functions for Translytical task flows (Preview) App Copilot (Preview) Modeling Power BI Modeling MCP Server (Preview) Semantic Model Version History (Generally Available) TMDL Visual Studio Code Extension (Generally Available) Data connectivity Spark and Impala Connectors (Generally Available) Visualizations Activity Gauge by Powerviz Decomposition Tree – All Expanding Dynamic chart legends in Zebra BI Charts Drill Down Bubble PRO by ZoomCharts Power BI Theme Generator Power Gantt Chart by Nova Silva Turn any image into data insights with Synoptic Panel by OKVIZ Announcing deprecation of R and Python visuals in Embed for your customers solution https://youtu.be/pRFeQWzUhn0 Events and Announcements Fabric Data Days is on now! Take your Power BI skills to the next level with live learning sessions, QuickViz challenges, discount vouchers for exam PL-300 and DP-600, and community connection. See what’s happening this week. FabCon is back from March 16-20, 2026, in Atlanta, GA Join us for the ultimate Power BI, Microsoft Fabric SQL, Real-Time Intelligence, AI, and Databases community-led event. The third annual FabCon Americas will feature sessions from your favorite Microsoft and community speakers, keynotes, more opportunities to Ask the Experts for 1:1 support, an engaging community lounge with opportunities to network and connect with your peers, a dedicated partner pre-day, a packed expo hall, Power Hour, Data Viz World Championship, and a can’t-miss attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium. Register with code FABCOMM to save $200. Copilot and AI Ask anything, anywhere with Standalone Copilot in Power BI mobile apps (Preview) In the coming app release, we are enabling a new standalone Copilot experience straight from your mobile homepage. A complete chat experience that allows you to ask any question about your data and get instance insights from Copilot, anytime, anywhere. This experience will be available in the app stores in the upcoming weeks. To start chatting with your data, use the new Copilot button on your home page. This will open a chat experience where you can type or dictate (IOS only) your question and Copilot will take it from there. When you ask about a metric or a KPI, most chances that Copilot will generate a visual for you in addition to answering your question with text. Tap on the visual to open a pane and interact with the generated visual. Tap on the citation or reference to learn what content Copilot used for grounding its answer. You can also open the report from there as well. If you want to share insight discovered in the chat with others, select the ‘Share’ button from the visual pane, or the copy from the chat. The iOS apps (iPhone and iPad) also support dictation – so you can use voice interaction to ask Copilot questions. Use the mic icon in the chat box and Copilot will start listening, waiting for your questions. With this new standalone Copilot experience, you can now easily get quick answers and stay on top of things by chatting with your data directly from your mobile. Updates to the standalone Copilot in Power BI The standalone Copilot in Power BI, also known as ‘chat with your data’, is now even easier to use. Previously, Copilot asked users to choose from a list of possible data sources before answering questions. Now, it handles that step automatically: if it finds a strong match, it selects it in the background and goes straight to the answer. When more context is needed, Copilot will ask simple clarifying questions to find the right source. Although the additional reasoning may require a few more seconds, obtaining an accurate response from a reliable source justifies the brief wait. Additionally, in response to search questions like ‘Find reports about sales’, you’ll now see a much simpler text-based list of items. New entry points right from the home page By late November, you’ll be able to access Copilot right on your home page, making it easier than ever to find what you’re looking for or ask ad hoc questions about your data! Simply type your question and hit enter. If you preferred the old home page, no problem. Switch back using the layout drop-down. New suggested prompts for recently opened items - Copilot now offers helpful prompt suggestions related to recently opened items to help users get started. Improved experience attaching items to your question - Want to add a report, or other items, to your question? Items are now sorted by recency and easily filtered by item type in a slick new design that aligns with other Copilot experiences across Microsoft. Experiment with all the new updates and let us know what you think! Improvements to the Report Copilot We’ve upgraded the Report Copilot experience in Power BI, making it easier than ever to create, edit, and refine beautiful, data-rich reports with the help of AI. With this update, Copilot in Power BI not only helps you create entire report pages in seconds but now also gives you more control, flexibility, and visual intelligence than ever before. The new Report Copilot experience is available now in the Power BI service and Power BI Desktop. Smarter, More Capable Visual Creation The new Copilot understands your data and intent more deeply than ever. Just tell it what you want to create, and watch your ideas come to life instantly. Better visual recommendations: Copilot now selects the most appropriate visuals for your data automatically. Expanded Visual Library: Copilot supports a wider range of visuals, giving you more options to present insights into exactly how you envision them. Improved context awareness: When you describe what you want to see, Copilot now understands more nuanced instructions, producing more accurate and insightful results. To learn more about creating and modifying reports with Copilot, refer to the Create reports in the Power BI service with Copilot documentation. Improvements to Verified Answers This update enhances how verified answers inherit the state of your visual, expands filtering flexibility, and delivers more reliable results. What’s New? Verified answers now inherit and reflect the entire visual state: Previously, verified answers only captured filter states active at the time of creation. With this update, they now inherit the entire visual state, including slicers. This change directly addresses one of the most common pieces of feedback we received. Report slicers impacting the visual are being inherited and shown in the verified answer. In addition to slicers, we will support additional visual states: Slicer selections Field parameter choices Cross filters and cross highlights Drill-through filters Expanded Filtering Capabilities for Authors: There is now more flexibility when configuring verified answers. The limit for predefined filter permutations has increased from 3 to 10, enabling more complex and nuanced configurations. From a consumption perspective, we see that most prompt requests naturally use between one and three filters. ‘Show total sales for the region 1 in Q1’. ‘What is the usage of Product 1 in Country 1 during Month 1’. ‘Show average satisfaction scores by City 1 and segment 1’. Still, some business questions require deeper combinations of filters, and this expanded limit ensures verified answers can handle even the most detailed reporting scenarios. Improved Filtering Reliability: What are more filters, if they aren’t applied consistently? We’ve made substantial improvements under the hood to how we match user prompts in Copilot to verified answers and the appropriate filters. Verified Answers now interpret and apply filters more accurately, reducing mismatches between what users ask and what’s displayed, and ensuring filters are included when they should be. New card visual support: We have enabled the highly requested new card visual that you can now set as verified answers, the new card visual and Azure maps will be supported in Verified Answers creation and consumption. Why it Matters: These updates make verified answers feel native to your Copilot consumption experiences, seamlessly adapting to slicers, filters, interactions, and drill-through actions that users have come to expect from their visuals. Consumers will get answers that truly reflect the context of their analysis. The result, faster, more accurate insights, and a smoother path from question to confidence, and better grounding for the rest of your Copilot experience to learn from. For more info on how these updates work, refer to the Prepare Your Data for AI - Verified Answers documentation. Remote Power BI Model Context Protocol Server for chat with your Data (Preview) Available soon, the remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Power BI provides agents and MCP clients with tools to enable you to chat with your data, remotely, all authenticated with Microsoft Entra ID. This means you’ll be able to create powerful, custom agents on top of data that lives in your semantic models. The server has three tools that give your agents the ability to reason over your data, and respond to a user’s prompts: Get Semantic Model Schema: This tool provides the agent with the structure of the semantic model. Generate Query: This tool uses Copilot in Power BI to generate a DAX query based on the user’s input and best practices. The agent can then iterate on this query if it chooses or simply proceeds with the provided query. Execute Query: This tool gives the agent a powerful mechanism to query the semantic model to respond to any question a user asks. These tools can be implemented by any application that hosts an MCP client, such as Visual Studio Code. Other, non-Microsoft MCP clients can be supported with Service Principal authentication, backed by Azure Entra ID. The remote MCP Server for Power BI enables you to easily build the next generation of agents on top of the data your organization has already invested so heavily in. For more information on the remote MCP server for Power BI, for more information, refer to the documentation. Reporting Automatically expand matrix columns to fill available space Last month, tables got the Grow to fit option expanding columns to fill the available space. This month, we are enabling the same option on the matrix visual. As a reminder: with the Grow to fit option, any extra space in the visual is evenly distributed across existing columns when the total column width is smaller than the visual container, which eliminates the need to do manual resizing to fill the gaps. If your matrix isn’t using the full visual width, you can manually resize columns or use the new ‘Grow to fit’ option. For example, this matrix doesn’t fully utilize the available space: Navigate to the format pane under Column headers > Options, toggle Auto-size width to ‘On’, and set ‘Resize behavior’ to ‘Grow to fit’. Instantly, your matrix expands to make full use of the available space. The additional available space will be distributed across the columns: In last month’s release we also had an overenthusiastic horizontal scrollbar when using this option. This has now been corrected. The horizontal scrollbar should not show unless there isn’t enough space to fit the content. Learn more about Grow to fit in the table and matrix documentation. Card visual (Generally Available) The new Card visual brings a modern and visually engaging way to highlight key metrics in your reports, now with full support for hero images and a consistent formatting control experience across visuals for an intuitive experience. Whether you’re highlighting a product, showcasing a team, or featuring a brand logo, the new hero image feature empowers you to create visually rich reports going far beyond simple data points. The Card visual also introduces a dynamic collage layout, letting you highlight one section while the other two share the remaining space. Try adding the new Card visual to your next report and experience the difference for yourself. For more details and step-by-step instructions, check out the official documentation at Create a (new) card visual in Power BI documentation. Enhancing Image visuals with styling, states, and more We’re excited to introduce enhancements to the Image visual, bringing it closer to the level of interactivity and design flexibility you’ve come to expect. Create more engaging experiences by customizing image visuals based on user interaction states such as default, hover, and pressed states of images. Alongside state customization, we’ve added formatting options to give you full control over the look and feel of your image visuals. Such as background, border, and shape. These enhancements make it easier than ever to integrate images seamlessly into your report layout. We’ve also expanded the sources, fit and effects section, with more options for image source, including upload, URL, or from a data field. You no longer need to delete the visual to update its image. With the latest update, you can easily change the image source or swap the image itself, making edits faster and more flexible. We hope these updates to the Image visual inspire you to get creative with your report designs. Whether adding a splash of branding, building intuitive navigation, or simply making your reports more engaging, the new features give you the flexibility to do it all. To learn more about the image visual, visit our documentation: Create an Image Visual in Power BI. OneLake Catalog now supports user data functions for Translytical task flows (Preview) The Fabric user data function selection experience for Translytical task flows has been improved. You can now use the OneLake catalog to discover and select the user data function that you want your action button to invoke. With the OneLake Catalog you can: Browse all available User data functions in one place. Search by keyword for quick access. View details like owner, location and sensitivity label Filter by My Functions or Endorsed in your org for confidence and governance. This new experience is available when selecting the function for Data function actions. Select a button, open the format pane, enable Action, and under Data function select the fx button. Learn more about Translytical task flows in Power BI and how Fabric user data functions can take your report beyond just showing data at Understand translytical task flows. App Copilot (Preview) Your app users now can chat with your curated data within the context of an app. An app-scoped Copilot means users can search for reports within an app, ask questions, and receive answers based on the reports in that app. App Copilot is a separate complement to report-scoped Copilot already available on each report viewed in an app. To learn more, refer to the Power BI app Copilot: AI scoped to the curated content in an app (Preview) blog post. Modeling Power BI Modeling MCP Server (Preview) The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables AI agents to securely connect with tools and services. The Power BI Modeling MCP Server brings Power BI semantic modeling capabilities to your AI agents through a local MCP server. This allows developers and AI applications to interact with Power BI models in entirely new ways, from using natural language to execute modeling changes to autonomous AI agentic development workflows. Capabilities Build and modify semantic models with natural language: Create or update tables, columns, measures, relationships and much more simply by describing what you need. Perform bulk modeling operations at scale: Rename, refactor, translate, or document hundreds of model objects in seconds. Apply modeling best practices: Easily evaluate and implement modeling best practices. Leverage agentic workflows: Work with Power BI Project files and TMDL code, enabling AI agents to autonomously plan and execute complex modeling tasks. Query and validate DAX expressions: Run DAX queries or validate measures directly through AI-driven workflows. Start by installing the Power BI Modeling MCP Server Visual Studio Code extension to enable Power BI semantic modeling capabilities in GitHub Copilot. Whether you’re using GitHub Copilot or another AI-powered assistant, the Power BI Modeling MCP Server unlocks a new era of intelligent, automated, and high-efficiency semantic model development. For additional information and to provide feedback, refer to Power BI Modeling MCP on GitHub. Semantic Model Version History (Generally Available) With version history, you can confidently make changes to your semantic models—whether you’re editing in the web or live editing Direct Lake semantic models in Desktop—knowing you can restore earlier versions and recover from critical mistakes. Versions are automatically captured in an Office-like history pane for your live edited semantic models, making it easy to select and restore any previous version. Power BI captures up to five versions for each semantic model that supports version history. Versions are saved automatically when you: Open a semantic model in Editing mode on the web or open a Direct Lake model for live editing in Desktop. Publish or upload a .pbix file. Restore a previous version. You can also manually save a version (with an optional description) from the File menu while editing on the web. Learn more about this capability including limitations in the Use semantic model version history (preview) documentation. TMDL Visual Studio Code Extension (Generally Available) This update brings DAX semantic highlighting support within TMDL documents alongside other enhanced authoring features like Power Query semantic highlighting, breadcrumb navigation, code actions, code formatting, localization, and numerous bug fixes. You can find more details about this latest release in the changelog. The TMDL extension is essential for anyone working with TMDL documents in Power BI Projects (PBIP). It brings modern code experiences to semantic modeling, enabling scalable development of semantic models with the efficiency, flexibility, and AI-powered workflows that today’s data teams expect. Get the TMDL Extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace to enhance your semantic modeling-as-code experience and accelerate your semantic model development today! Screenshot of VSCode Marketplace Feature Highlights DAX support: Improved readability of DAX code within TMDL documents including semantic highlighting, real-time diagnostics, and autocomplete. Power Query support: Autocomplete, diagnostics, syntax highlighting, hover and formatting. Localization: Hover descriptions and code action messages are now displayed in the user’s preferred language, aligning with Visual Studio Code language settings. Code actions: Quick fix and refactoring TMDL code such as duplicated lineage tag or misspelled property. Code navigation: Easily navigate TMDL document objects in a hierarchical view. Code format: Automatically organize TMDL code for enhanced readability and consistency. We value your input and encourage you to share it using vscode-tmdl GitHub repository. Data connectivity Spark and Impala Connectors (Generally Available) We’re thrilled to announce that Implementation 2.0 for the Spark and Impala Connectors is now generally available, powered by the open-source Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) driver. This update delivers faster, more secure connectivity for Power BI Desktop, making it easier to analyze and visualize large datasets. How does this improve your Power BI experience? Performance boost: Reduced overhead with no serialization or copying. Security improvements: Memory safety and garbage collection aligned with SDL standards. Seamless integration: Works across Fabric experiences and Power BI Desktop for unified data access. Beginning November 2025, specify [Implementation="2.0"] in your connection settings to utilize these improvements: Spark: ApacheSpark.Tables("http://server.cloudapp.azure.com:10001/cliservice", 2, [BatchSize=null, HierarchicalNavigation=true, Implementation="2.0"]) Impala: Impala.Database("server.cloudapp.azure.com", [Implementation="2.0"]) For further details, please refer to the Spark Connector and Impala Connector documentation. Visualizations Activity Gauge by Powerviz The Activity Gauge is an advanced visual used to measure the progress against a set target or Goal for multiple categories. It is typically presented in the form of a radial bar chart/Gauge, displaying a range of values or percentages. This visual is commonly used for project management, performance tracking, and monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Key Features: Gauge Customization: Shape, style, and add icons for a unique design. Targets: Choose from options or use a custom field to set a target. Data Colors: Offers 7 schemes and 30+ color palettes. Smart Labels: Add data and leaf labels that auto-adjust inside or outside the shape for better readability. Center Circle: Customize center circle with text, icons, measures, and images. Interactive Mouseover: Hover for Interactive Info Display. Fill Patterns: Highlight gauges with patterns or upload your own. Conditional Formatting – Create rules based on measure or category rules. Other features included are ranking, annotation, grid view, show condition, and accessibility support. Business Use Cases: Project Management: Track task progress for efficient project oversight. Financial Dashboard: Gain instant insights into key financial metrics. Try Activity Gauge for FREE from AppSource Check out all features of the visual: Demo file Step-by-step instructions: Documentation YouTube Video: Video Link Learn more about visuals: https://powerviz.ai/ Follow Powerviz: https://lnkd.in/gN_9Sa6U Decomposition Tree – All Expanding Decomposition tree All Expanding Visual now allows you to add a legend field. This creates additional column chart beside each node showing breakdown from another dimension. This is depicted in image below. The visual below analyzes the revenue of two largest consumer good companies Unilever and P&G by products. We add region field in the legends section to show additional breakdown of Revenue by Region. The data used is fictitious and used for analysis purposes only. The visual also allows you to add images to nodes. Check out the video on Decomposition Tree All Expanding - Power BI custom visual, demonstrating all the features of this custom visual. Download this visual from APPSOURCE Download demo file from APPSOURCE For more information visit https://www.excelnaccess.com/decomposition-tree/ or contact [email protected] Dynamic chart legends in Zebra BI Charts Which version of the plan am I looking at? - Finance teams ask this daily when switching between budgets, forecasts, and plans. Static chart labels in Power BI waste hours every week and lead to confusion, misinterpretation, and reporting errors. The new dynamic chart legends in Zebra BI Charts for Power BI remove that guesswork by automatically adapting chart legends to the selected filter or scenario, so you can always trust what you see. See the full update How it helps - In FP&A, Actuals are often compared against multiple baselines. Waterfall charts are ideal for this, but static legends stay fixed even when scenarios change. Real-world use cases Comparing forecast versions: Before, every scenario looked the same: ‘Plan’. Now, legends show AC 2024 vs Revised Forecast Q3, eliminating ambiguity. Year-over-year analysis: Previously, reports displayed AC [Year] regardless of selection. Now, legends update from AC 2024 vs PY 2023 to AC 2025 vs PY 2024. Regional reporting: Legends now reflect the active region: AC vs EMEA Budget or AC vs Americas Budget, without manual checks. Together with dynamic titles and dynamic column headers, Zebra BI delivers a fully responsive, accurate, and effortless reporting experience in Power BI. Explore Zebra BI for Power BI Drill Down Bubble PRO by ZoomCharts Say hello to the latest visual by ZoomCharts! With Bubble PRO, you can create visually impressive and user-friendly bubble charts that make complex data simple to explore. What sets Bubble PRO apart from other visuals is the user experience. UI interactions are made as intuitive as possible: freely pan the chart, pinch or scroll to zoom in, click on a marker to drill down, and quickly make single or bulk selections. Coupled with smooth UI animations, seamless cross-filtering and full touch support, you can design more interactive and insightful reports. Main features Drill Down: Create a multi-level hierarchy; and click to drill down. Data-driven Formatting: Apply custom marker colors, shapes, or images directly from data. Trendlines: Show a linear or polynomial regression line that dynamically recalculates whenever the chart changes. Thresholds: Display up to 4 reference lines or areas on each axis. Area Shading: Highlight up to 8 custom areas with rectangles or ellipses. We also have other news: you can now sign up to the free Developer License and use Bubble and 20+ other ZoomCharts visuals in Power BI Desktop for a year! Get Bubble PRO on AppSource Power BI Theme Generator In September 2023, our BIBB Report Theme Generator for Power BI was spotlighted on the Power BI blog. Since then, we've rebuilt and expanded it to help teams standardize look-and-feel, meet accessibility baselines, and export production-ready JSON themes in seconds. The generator streamlines brand color, typography, and visual style setup—making it easy for BI teams to deliver consistent, on-brand reports while reducing manual rework. What's new: a smarter color engine with contrast checks, gradients creation, AI powered themes creation, preset brand colors, apply theme through Fabric, select font, live preview on your own report, and advanced BI.ST mode for power users, while keeping the simplicity of one-click JSON export. Common use cases include (1) rolling out or updating corporate brand themes across workspaces, (2) accelerating new report builds with vetted defaults, and (3) improving report readability and accessibility with contrast-safe palettes. Learn more and see all features on our product page below. Links Find the simplest yet most powerful Power BI Theme Generator All features & documentation Power Gantt Chart by Nova Silva We’re thrilled to introduce one of the most requested features in Power Gantt: task dependencies! With our latest release, you can now add Finish-to-Start (FS) dependencies between tasks—visually represented as arrows connecting one task’s finish to another’s start. This powerful enhancement brings true project scheduling capability to Power BI. By visualizing dependencies, teams can better understand task sequences, identify bottlenecks, and manage timelines more effectively. Adding dependencies is simple—just define them in your dataset, and Power Gantt does the rest. Arrows will automatically appear on your Gantt chart, making relationships between tasks clear and actionable. Whether you’re managing product launches, construction schedules, or complex workflows, FS dependencies make your Power Gantt chart smarter, more dynamic, and easier to interpret. Start using dependencies today and take your project tracking to the next level! Try the Power Gantt Chart for FREE now on your own project data by downloading it from the AppSource. Questions or remarks? Visit us at: Power Gantt Chart for Power BI. Turn any image into data insights with Synoptic Panel by OKVIZ With Synoptic Panel, you can transform any SVG image into an interactive visual directly in your report. Perfect for floor plans, organizational charts, technical layouts, or geographical maps, it lets you integrate your data with images your audience already knows. A dynamic dashboard, where users can naturally explore insights by clicking on shapes and areas. This makes complex information easier to understand and more engaging to navigate. Key features include: Flexible image loading: use local files embedded in reports, remote URLs, or My Storage, our secure hosting service. Multi-level navigation: drill down into building floors or geographical regions, with automatic hierarchy creation when using remote configurations. Dynamic switching: change maps through slicers or bookmarks. Map Editor and Label Designer: fine-tune data binding, arrange and customize labels directly in the visual. Advanced coloring: apply conditional formatting and color rules to build heatmaps or highlight key areas. Map search: quickly locate maps or areas for faster access. Integrated security: safely host and distribute maps while keeping control of access. Full customization: adapt interactions, appearance, and data binding to your reporting needs. Explore real-world use cases and try Synoptic Panel for free! General Announcing deprecation of R and Python visuals in Embed for your customers solution We are announcing an important change for Power BI customers who use Embed for your customers with R or Python visuals. As part of our ongoing commitment to provide a secure, scalable, and robust analytics platform, we continually evaluate our feature set to ensure alignment with industry standards, customer needs, and platform performance. What’s Changing? Starting May 2026, Power BI will end support for the ability to embed reports and dashboards containing R or Python visuals using Power BI’s Embed for your customers solution (also known as app owns data) and Publish to web scenarios. Embed for your customers typically involves a custom app which manages authentication directly, and for which app users do not need Power BI licenses. This change does not impact customers leveraging secure embeddings to SharePoint, Website or Portal. Embed for your organization (also known as user owns data) scenarios are also not impacted. Timeline for Deprecation Announcement & Guidance: Effective immediately, customers are notified of the upcoming deprecation. Deprecation Date: Official support for embedding R and Python visuals in PaaS scenarios will end on 05/01/2026. Post-Deprecation: After this date, any embedded Power BI reports or dashboards containing R or Python visuals will still load, but the R or Python charts will display as blank. Reports without these visuals will continue to function as expected. Recommended Actions for Customers Review all embedded Power BI reports and dashboards to identify usage of R or Python visuals. Plan to update or redesign any affected reports using alternative Power BI visuals or DAX-based analytics. Consider leveraging Fabric Notebooks for more sophisticated or technical visualizations. Consult the Power BI & Fabric documentation for guidance on using alternative visuals effectively. Support and Resources We understand that this change may require updates to your existing solutions. Please reach out via the Power BI community forums or through your Microsoft account representative for personalized guidance. Closing This concludes this month’s update. We hope the information provided in this update is useful. If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store, please leave us a review. As always, keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next. We are looking forward to hearing from you!Power BI January 2026 Feature Summary
The January 2026 Power BI Feature Summary is packed with exciting news—there are fresh updates, important announcements, and some big changes, especially around upcoming events, feature retirements, and the latest in AI and Copilot advancements. Some of the standout features include new reporting tools, smarter data modeling options, enhanced resources for developers, broader global standards support and upgraded visualizations. With these improvements, Power BI is making analytics easier to use, helping you work more efficiently, and connecting all your tools even better than before. FabCon Atlanta is fast approaching! If you’re looking for more details, check out the Events & Announcements section. We hope you’ll join us! Contents Events & Announcements General Deprecation of Power BI Q&A SQL Server Reporting Services Report Viewer Web Part Support Discontinuation The Power BI application is accessible within Teams on Microsoft 365 Operated by 21Vianet Copilot and AI Attach reference to Copilot chat in the Power BI mobile app Updating Prepped for AI setting name to Approved for Copilot Standalone Copilot Access on Power BI Home Reporting Field parameters persist hierarchy level setting Format Pane Improvements Introducing Markers in Azure Maps Visual Modern Visual Tooltips (Generally Available) Column Sizing Update in Tables and Matrices Modeling Updates on Editing Semantic Models in the Power BI Service Chinese coded character set (GB18030-2022) support Developers + API’s Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) as Default Format Visualizations Funnel Chart by Powerviz Nebula by BI Samurai Events & Announcements Could you be the next Power BI Dataviz World Champion? There’s only one way to find out! By joining this global contest, you will have the opportunity to tackle three weekly challenges designed to stretch visualization skills and inspire innovation. Four finalists will be selected to compete for the title of world champion LIVE on stage at FabCon Atlanta. Learn more about how to enter and view the entries from the first week, happening now. Two months until FabCon – will we see you there? Join us for the ultimate Power BI, Microsoft Fabric SQL, Real-Time Intelligence, AI, and Databases community-led event from March 16-20, 2026, in Atlanta, GA. The third annual FabCon Americas will feature sessions from your favorite Microsoft and community speakers, keynotes, more opportunities to Ask the Experts for 1:1 support, an engaging community lounge with opportunities to network and connect with your peers, a dedicated partner pre-day, a packed expo hall, attendee favorites Power Hour and the Data Viz World Championships live finals, and a can’t-miss attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium. Register with code FABCOMM to save $200. General Deprecation of Power BI Q&A Q&A, our legacy natural language tool, will be deprecated in December 2026. Moving forward, use Power BI Copilot, which provides a more advanced and integrated solution for querying data with natural language. For more details and recommended alternatives, refer to the blog post on Deprecating Power BI Q&A. SQL Server Reporting Services Report Viewer Web Part Support Discontinuation Support for SSRS SharePoint Webpart, a component that allows you to embed on-prem paginated reports directly into SharePoint Server pages, will end on April 13, 2026. While the download will continue to be available, there will be no future updates for this component. For more information and recommended alternatives, refer to SSRS SharePoint Webpart documentation. The Power BI application is accessible within Teams on Microsoft 365 Operated by 21Vianet Users can acquire the Power BI app from the app store, or admins can centrally install it for them. Once added, users can view their Power BI content in Teams using the app, and pin Power BI items to chats or channels using Tabs. The following features are not supported in the Power BI app for Teams operated by 21Vianet environment: Power BI notifications in Microsoft Teams Power BI preview cards Please also refer to the service description of Power BI in 21Vianet: Power BI operated by 21Vianet in China. For installation instructions, please refer to: Add the Power BI app to Microsoft Teams. Copilot and AI Attach reference to Copilot chat in the Power BI mobile app In certain situations, you may know precisely which item you want Copilot to reference when generating its response. For those cases, we added the ability to attach a Report or Semantic model to Copilot chat as a grounded reference. To add a reference, tap the + icon or type / to search and select an item. The selected item appears in the chat Copilot uses it to ground its answers. Updating Prepped for AI setting name to Approved for Copilot In May 2025, we launched the capability to mark a model as prepped for AI. The name of this setting has been updated to “approved for Copilot”. Enabling this setting in a semantic model applies three main functionalities: The standalone Copilot agent doesn’t apply friction treatment to answers from that model. Authors can turn on the admin setting to only show approved items in the standalone Copilot experience. Models marked as approved for AI are boosted in the Copilot search experience. After you prepare your semantic model for AI and it's ready for consumption, you can mark your model Approved for Copilot by following these steps: Navigate to the Power BI service and find your semantic model. Select the Settings icon in the upper left corner. Expand the Approved Copilot section. Select the Approved Copilot box, and then select the Apply button. Standalone Copilot Access on Power BI Home Introducing a new Standalone Copilot entry point right on the Power BI Home page! This update brings Copilot closer to where you start your day, making it faster and easier to jump into AI‑powered insights. Why bring Copilot to Home? Placing Copilot directly on the Home page comes with several benefits: Faster insights - start asking questions the moment you land on Home. Easier discovery - new users see Copilot right away, encouraging them to use it as part of their natural workflow. When does it appear? The new entry point will show up automatically when: Standalone Copilot is enabled by your tenant admin. You have a valid Copilot capacity available. If either requirement isn’t met, don’t worry—you’ll continue to see the classic home experience. Prefer the classic view? You can always switch back to Recommended content using the picker at the top of the Home page. Toggle between the experiences your workflow needs. To learn more, visit: Standalone Copilot experience in Power BI (Preview). Reporting Field parameters persist hierarchy level setting In July 2025, field parameters became generally available, improving how matrices remember their expanded or collapsed state when the field parameter selection changes. Previously, many users found it confusing that a matrix would fully collapse whenever a field parameter value changed. Since the update, however, some users have shared that they preferred the earlier behavior because it felt more familiar and better suited for their workflows. To address this, we've added a new report-level setting that lets you restore the pre-July 2025 behavior for field parameters' expansion and collapse of hierarchy levels. By default, hierarchy levels remain persistent, but you can switch off this feature for a report using the Persist Hierarchy Level setting. The following examples are where to find it: In Power BI Desktop, navigate to Options and settings > Options > Current File > Report settings > Field Parameters > Persist hierarchy level. In Fabric, navigate to the report settings and find Persist hierarchy level under Field parameter options. To illustrate the difference, consider a matrix showing a field parameter called Product Group and a column called Year on the rows, displaying Total sales. The field parameter allows selection of Category, Class, Color, or any combination. In the following example, Category is selected, and the Categories are expanded, so you can see values broken down by Year: Now, when you change the field parameter from Category to Class, what happens depends on the Persist hierarchy level setting. If it's on, the matrix remains expanded, keeping the Year column visible; If it's off, the matrix collapses and displays only values for Class. The following table provides a comparison showing both behaviors based on whether the toggle is enabled or disabled. On Off We greatly value user feedback and continuously strive to improve the experience based on your input. The introduction of the persist hierarchy level setting is a direct result of listening to your suggestions, and we hope this new option enhances your reporting workflows and satisfaction. To learn more about the toggle and its impact, refer to the documentation on Let report readers use field parameters to change visuals. Format Pane Improvements With this version, we are releasing two improvements to Format Pane – Improved Color picker and reset to default experiences. Improved Color Picker Experience in Power BI Power BI report creators can customize colors in visuals with a theme color picker and custom color picker. We have added additional capabilities to this release. A clear indicator for the currently selected theme color. A simple way to reset colors to their default settings. A back button to return from custom colors to theme colors. This enhancement makes color customization more intuitive and efficient, helping you design reports with confidence and ease. Learn more about color formatting your visuals in the Tips and tricks for formatting color in reports documentation. Granular Reset Options in the Format Pane Format pane reset to default quickly let’s report creators undo customizations made to a visual. With this release, you can now reset default with finer control, for a single formatting group in the format pane. This is in addition to the existing functionality of reset to default for the whole visual and each section of the format pane. Reset this group settings to default within each section. Reset group settings without impacting the rest of the section. This enhancement delivers greater flexibility and usability, making it easier to fine-tune your report formatting with confidence. Learn more about formatting visuals in Power BI reports in the Get started formatting report visualizations documentation. Introducing Markers in Azure Maps Visual Azure Maps Visual for Power BI now supports a powerful new capability: Markers. Display your data points using customized icons, varying sizes, and advanced formatting features to improve narrative clarity in geospatial analysis. Replace basic shape markers with icons or custom images to represent deliveries, facilities, or assets using meaningful symbols like trucks, warehouses, or alerts. Scale marker sizes dynamically reflect the data measures such as shipment volume, population density, or sales. Customize colors and transparency for improved contrast and visibility on the map. Use distinct icons for each category, making reports easier to interpret. Learn more about the rich capabilities of Azure maps in Power BI reports in the Get started with Azure Maps Power BI visual documentation. Modern Visual Tooltips (Generally Available) Modern visual tooltips introduces enhanced usability, accessibility, and interactivity to your reports. These tooltips offer new capabilities in Power BI reports. Drill actions: The new Actions footer lets users drill down, drill up, or drill through data points directly from the tooltip—no need to use the right-click menu or visual header. This streamlines navigation and makes exploring data more intuitive. Styling: Tooltips automatically match your report’s theme colors, with options to further customize background, text, and icon colors in both the theme and Format pane. New reports get updated styling and the Actions footer by default. Existing reports keep their previous customizations, and you can enable or disable the Actions footer anytime via the Format pane. Modern visual tooltips in Power BI reports enhance usability and interactivity by allowing users to drill down, up, or through data directly from the tooltip Actions footer. These tooltips automatically adopt report theme colors, offer customization options, and provide updated styling by default for new reports, with flexibility to enable or disable the Actions footer as needed in the Format pane. To learn more, refer to the Create Visual Tooltips documentation. Column Sizing Update in Tables and Matrices In previous releases, table and matrix visuals automatically expanded their columns to fill the available space. This feature was introduced for tables in October 2025 and for matrices in November 2025. You gave us feedback that this often meant that even small fields stretched wider than necessary, creating layouts that felt inconsistent or wasted screen real estate. With this month’s release, that behavior has changed. In reports created from this release onward, columns are once again sized by default based on the content they contain. This makes tables and matrices more compact, easier to read, and better aligned with the actual data. You can still manually adjust column widths, or use Grow to Fit to expand columns when needed. But by default, visuals now prioritize content-driven sizing, giving you cleaner and more predictable layouts right out of the box. Here’s a before and after of the defaults: Before After We want to thank everyone who provided feedback. We greatly appreciate it! To learn more, refer to the documentation on adjusting column width in the table and matrix. Modeling Updates on Editing Semantic Models in the Power BI Service In September 2025, we announced the General Availability of editing semantic models in the Power BI Service. Models configured with incremental refresh are now supported, eliminating the prior restriction that prevented these models from being opened in the service. You can now seamlessly open and edit these models directly into the Power BI Service. However, note that semantic models with incremental refresh still cannot be downloaded as PBIX files, and you cannot use the Power Query editor when editing these models in the web experience. To learn more about editing semantic models in the service, refer to the Edit semantic models in the Power BI service documentation. Chinese coded character set (GB18030-2022) support China’s GB18030‑2022 standard is the latest update to the national character set requirements. It ensures compatibility with Unicode 11.0 and mandates support for additional characters, including minority scripts and emoji. For organizations operating in or with China, compliance is not optional. Rather, it’s a regulatory requirement. Starting with this release, Power BI can be configured to respect GB18030‑2022 encoding using the UnicodeCharacterBehavior setting. This setting is set to CodeUnits by default. To ensure your model is compatible with GB18030-2022, you’ll need to execute a specific XMLA command to set UnicodeCharacterBehavior to CodePoints: <Alter AllowCreate="true" ObjectExpansion="ObjectProperties" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine"> <Object> <DatabaseID>[your database id]</DatabaseID> </Object> <ObjectDefinition> <Database ....> <ID>[your model id]</ID> <Name>[your model name]</Name> <Language>[your language code]</Language> <ddl200:CompatibilityLevel>[your model compatibility level]</ddl200:CompatibilityLevel> <ddl200_200:StorageEngineUsed>[your storage engine]</ddl200_200:StorageEngineUsed> <UnicodeCharacterBehavior xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2025/engine/924/924">CodePoints</UnicodeCharacterBehavior> ... </Database> </ObjectDefinition> </Alter> Adding GB18030‑2022 support in Power BI isn’t just a technical tweak; it’s a compliance safeguard and a way to ensure your reports remain globally accessible. With the above XMLA command, you can align your semantic models with modern encoding standards and avoid downstream issues in multilingual environments. The UnicodeCharacterBehavior influences any DAX function that determines the length of a text string, which include FIND, LEFT, LEN, MID, REPLACE, RIGHT. These functions will exhibit different behaviors when working with text strings that contain Unicode characters. Let's look at how this works in practice. Here’s a measure that uses LEN to calculate the length of a text string: StringLength = LEN ( SELECTEDVALUE ( 'Table'[Column1] ) ) Here’s a before and after comparison of the result of StringLength on a column that contains Unicode characters: UnicodeCharacterBehavior = CodeUnits (default) UnicodeCharacterBehavior = CodePoints Notice how on the left each Unicode character has length 2, where on the right, each Unicode character has length 1. To learn more, refer to the documentation. Developers + API’s Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) as Default Format In November 2025, we announced PBIR will become the default Power BI Report Format for both PBIX and PBIP files (For PBIX users, switching to the PBIR report format does not impact their experience). PBIR will be activated by default in the Power BI service as part of a phased rollout, with full availability anticipated by the end of February. Beginning with the March release, PBIR will be set as the default format in Power BI Desktop. PBIR is currently in Preview with an opt-out option. Switching to PBIR is the last step before its General Availability, planned for Q3 2026. Any issues found now will be prioritized and addressed. Any issues identified during this period will be prioritized and addressed by our support team. We recommend preparing for this transition ahead of GA, as PBIR will be the only supported report format once it becomes generally available. Visualizations Funnel Chart by Powerviz The Funnel Chart by Powerviz is a stunning and informative visualization. It has 4 chart types in 1 visual, including a pyramid chart. The Power BI-certified visual is useful for tracking progress through different stages. It can also group data with legends for detailed insights. Key Features: Funnel Settings: Multiple display types are available, including vertical and horizontal orientation. Data Colors: Offers 7 schemes and 30+ color palettes. Labels: Select from multiple display styles with a custom label option included. Conversion Rate: In a single click measure the percentage of top and bottom stages to identify bottlenecks. Fill Patterns: Highlight stages with custom or pre-filled patterns. Conditional Formatting: Create rules based on measure or category rules. Totals: Display the total value at the top or bottom of the funnel chart. Ranking: Filter out Top/Bottom N stages. Annotation: Create multiple stories from one visual with comments for easy collaboration and clarity. Many other features included are grid view, show condition, and accessibility support. Business Use Cases: Sales Funnel Analysis, Marketing Campaigns, User Onboarding, & Website Traffic Try Funnel Chart for FREE from AppSource Check out all features of the visual: Demo_file Step-by-step instructions: Documentation YouTube Video: Video_Link Learn more about visuals: https://powerviz.ai/ Follow Powerviz: https://lnkd.in/gN_9Sa6U Nebula by BI Samurai Nebula by BI Samurai is a free certified Power BI custom visual for layout and background design, helping you create structured, consistent, and visually polished report pages—directly inside Power BI. Nebula simplifies report design by letting you build layouts that guide user attention, improve readability, and enhance storytelling—without using external design tools. Key Features: Customizable shapes – create precise layouts and background sections. Flexible color and transparency controls – match your report’s theme perfectly. Layer control – easily arrange and reorder elements. Custom default styles – set your own shape presets once and apply them easily across multiple pages. Lightweight and performance-optimized – designed to keep reports fast and responsive. Whether you're a designer or analyst, Nebula helps you transform plain Power BI pages into professional-looking, structured dashboards that communicate clearly and consistently. Microsoft Certified and available on AppSource, Nebula meets Microsoft’s standards for security, quality, and reliability. Learn more and explore design examples at bisamurai.com/nebula. Download Nebula from the AppSource: Nebula by BI Samurai. Check our Nebula demo video. Closing This concludes this month’s update. We hope the information provided in this update is useful. If you installed Power BI Desktop from the Microsoft Store, please leave us a review. As always, keep voting on Ideas to help us determine what to build next. We look forward to hearing from you!Model explorer with calculation group authoring is now available in Power BI service including Direct Lake semantic models
We are excited to announce the availability of Model Explorer when editing data models in the Power BI service! Learn more about editing data models in the Power BI service at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/transform-model/service-edit-data-models. Direct Lake semantic models in Microsoft Fabric also use this Power BI service to edit the model when you click “New semantic model” in the Lakehouse, SQL analytics endpoint, and Warehouse. Learn more about Direct Lake at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/enterprise/directlake-overview. With the Model Explorer available for editing data models in the Power BI service these semantic models, both Direct Lake and those in import or DirectQuery, not only get visibility of their semantic model in a tree view but also can create calculation groups! Learn more about the Model Explorer with these resources: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/transform-model/model-explorer https://powerbi.microsoft.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-model-explorer-with-calculation-group-authoring-and-creating-relationships-in-the-properties-pane/ Here is a quick demo of how to create a calculation group in a Direct Lake semantic model. This demo assumes you have Microsoft Fabric trial or capacity available, and the workspace is using it. In the Power BI service, I navigate to a workspace on a Fabric trail or capacity where I have a Lakehouse with data. In my Lakehouse, I have some data already created. I click the “New semantic model” button to create a new semantic model in my workspace. I select the tables I want to use in my model. I can add or remove them later as well. ailable_in_Power_BI_ser Now in the Data pane I can see the Tables and Model options. The Model option will take me to the Model Explorer. I can right-click on the Calculation groups to create a new calculation group. I will be prompted that this will turn on Discourage Implicit Measures (Learn more). And now my calculation group will be created! Learn more about calculation groups at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/transform-model/desktop-tutorial-create-calculated-columns. Some limitations to keep in mind: (1) Renaming the calculation group column may result in an error, and (2) renaming the calculation group is currently blocked. Both are bugs we are actively working on fixing. In the meantime, you can rename these using XMLA as explained in https://powerbi.microsoft.com/blog/announcing-calculation-groups-for-direct-lake-datasets/. The Model Explorer also allows you to create relationships in the properties pane, which can be helpful for models with a lot of tables that are harder to create relationships with drag and drop. And once I have created some more relationships and measures I can see all these items in the Data pane’s model explorer. Try out the model explorer today! Editing data models in the Power BI service and Model Explorer are both in public preview, and we would love to hear your feedback. The public preview blog post has more information including how to submit feedback at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/blog/edit-your-data-model-in-the-power-bi-service-public-preview-opt-in/.Improvements for creating new Direct Lake semantic models
Microsoft Fabric introduced the Direct Lake storage mode for Power BI a few months ago, but the technology is still brand new and super-hot. Once you have all your data in OneLake, you can model your data in Direct Lake semantic models to create lightning- fast reports providing data driven insights. As part of our continued tooling improvements, we have enhanced the experience for creating Direct Lake semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. This applies to semantic models created by clicking the New semantic model button from the Lakehouse (as in the below screenshot) or Lakehouse’s SQL analytics endpoint as well as from Data Warehouses. Users with access to the Lakehouse or Warehouse can create custom Direct Lake semantic models in just a few steps. Click the New semantic model button. Type a name for the semantic model. Conveniently select the target workspace where they want to create the semantic model. Select the desired tables (and views). Note, however, that these enhancements are only available for custom Direct Lake models. These changes do not apply to the default semantic model, shown in the workspace as “Semantic model (default)”, which is automatically created for the T-SQL endpoint of your Lakehouse or Warehouse. When creating a custom Direct Lake model, keep the following requirements in mind: Enter the name of the new custom semantic model instead of relying on an auto-generated name. The Lakehouse workspace is the default save location, but the semantic model can be saved in a different workspace from the workspace dropdown. Views are not shown by default in the list of source objects. This is because views added as tables into a Direct Lake model always require fall back to DirectQuery mode. These view-backed tables in the Direct Lake model cannot be queried by using pure Direct Lake mode. We strive to be transparent with the impact of views when they are added to the semantic model. A banner appears when Show views is selected. Relationships, measures, and other properties are not inherited from the SQL analytics default semantic model. You can instead define them manually to meet your specific needs – as well as add many additional semantic modeling objects not supported by the default semantic model such as calculation groups and dynamic format strings. Utilize the model explorer to see all your semantic model objects and expand the model even further with the XMLA endpoint. Get table and column changes after creation. After the initial creation of a Direct Lake model, you can use the Edit tables button to update the tables and columns with the latest schema changes from the data source, typically changes made to the delta tables in the Lakehouse, such as renaming or adding/removing columns. In custom Direct Lake models, schema changes are not updated automatically without user intervention. This behavior is comparable to import and DirectQuery semantic models in Power BI. In the workspace lineage view you can see custom Direct Lake models downstream from the Lakehouse’s SQL analytics endpoint, and from each of these semantic models you can see their downstream reports. This is a great view that lets you quickly see all the artifacts that use your Lakehouse or Warehouse. Learn more with these resources. Direct Lake at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/enterprise/directlake-overview. Creating a new Direct Lake semantic model at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/enterprise/directlake-overview. Microsoft Fabric at https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-fabric.Leveraging pure Direct Lake mode for maximum query performance
Co-authored with Kay Unkroth We are happy to announce a new Direct Lake semantic model property to control Direct Lake behavior. Direct Lake, by default, will transparently fallback to DirectQuery whenever a DAX query exceeds the limits on a SKU or uses features not supported by Direct Lake mode, such as SQL views from the Warehouse. This makes sure your reports show data, but it could be at the cost of performance. Now you can choose what happens instead. This property can be viewed or set when you open the data model in the Fabric workspace. In the Data pane navigate to the Model Explorer, click on Semantic model, and then in the Properties pane choose the Direct Lake behavior on your custom Direct Lake semantic model. Automatic will allow Direct Lake with fallback to DirectQuery. This is the default behavior. Direct Lake only will ensure no fallback. DirectQuery only will always fallback to DirectQuery, running all DAX queries as SQL queries through the Warehouse. Advanced BI pros working with Direct Lake models using third-party tools or custom solutions based on Tabular Object Model (TOM) or Tabular Model Scripting Language (TMSL) can also use this property to control query processing. Specifically, BI pros can now configure their semantic models to use pure Direct Lake mode. The new property is called DirectLakeBehavior. It can be configured to allow Direct Lake and DirectQuery mode (Automatic), Direct Lake-only mode, or DirectQuery-only mode, as in the following code listing. The default setting for DirectLakeBehavior is Automatic, which means Direct Lake models read delta tables directly from OneLake — unless they encounter an issue that prevents efficient loading of data into memory. Reasons include delta tables that exceed the SKU-based max number of parquet files or row groups, memory pressure, and feature limitations, such as model tables based on Data Warehouse views. The presence of Row-level security (RLS) or Object-level security (OLS) at the source also falls into the category of feature limitations. Another frequently encountered reason is an unprocessed table in the Direct Lake model. If you programmatically add a table to a model by using a third-party tool, TOM, or TMSL, don’t forget to process (refresh) the table so that Direct Lake mode can load the columns into memory when a DAX query needs them. Otherwise, if a column needed for a DAX query can’t be loaded, Direct Lake mode falls back to DirectQuery mode to process the DAX query, which can impact DAX query performance. For more details, check out the Fallback and Known issues and limitations sections in the Direct Lake overview article in the product documentation. Fallback to DirectQuery mode ensures that reports built on top of a Direct Lake model show results despite any Direct Lake-impacting issues. On the flip side, this fallback can also hide critical problems. Perhaps your delta tables require optimization to keep the number of parquet files and row groups at reasonable levels. Perhaps, the data volume necessitates a higher Fabric SKU to leverage Direct Lake model more consistently. Or perhaps you would just like a reminder that you need to process your tables after schema changes. With fallback enabled, how can you be sure that your semantic models really leverage Direct Lake mode? Up until now, you had to analyze the query processing in Performance analyzer or by using SQL Server Profiler to discover fallbacks to DirectQuery mode. But the new DirectLakeBehavior property greatly simplifies this. Just set the DirectLakeBehavior property to DirectLakeOnly and your DAX queries will fail when the data can’t be loaded. The error message conveniently reveals the reasons. Or put another way, if your DAX queries succeed in pure Direct Lake mode, you can rest assured that your semantic model can load the columns. Moreover, did you notice the DirectQueryOnly option? Yes, you can now configure a Direct Lake model to always operate in DirectQuery mode. This can make sense for performance measurements. If you test query perf in DirectQueryOnly mode, you can reliably evaluate the impact of fallback. If DirectQueryOnly perf is acceptable, it makes sense to enable fallback for your semantic model in production. If it isn’t, DirectLakeOnly might be the better option. As a best practice, we recommend that you work with your Direct Lake models in pure Direct Lake mode during the model authoring phase and then evaluate fallback performance in pure DirectQuery mode to determine the best DirectLakeBehavior configuration when deploying your solution to production. Fabric is redefining how customers can build their BI solutions for faster performance at big-data scale while at the same time reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and infrastructure complexity, and Direct Lake models are a key to delivering actionable insights with the speed of thought on top of your Fabric investment. So, don’t delay and leverage pure Direct Lake mode in your model authoring. We hope this new level of control helps you streamline your Direct Lake model authoring processes. And as always, please provide us with feedback if you want to help deliver additional enhancements. We hope you are as excited about Fabric and semantic models in Direct Lake mode as we are. We think this is a massive innovation and are looking forward to hearing from you!Deep dive into DAX query view for web
We are excited to announce you can now write DAX queries with DAX query view for web from published semantic models in the workspace. In Power BI, DAX formulas are used to define different types of calculations such as measures or calculated columns. DAX queries, on the other hand, can be used to return data from the semantic model. DAX queries are like SQL queries in that they can show your data by specified group by columns and aggregations. For DAX queries, this includes the measures already defined in your model and you can define additional query scoped measures, if needed. To write DAX queries in DAX query view in the web, there is a workspace setting that needs to be enabled and there are two entry points. DAX query view in the web needs the User can edit data models in the Power BI service (preview) turned on. This is found in Workspace settings > Power BI > General. DAX query view does allow some paths to update or add measures. Click on Write DAX queries from the right-click, or context menu, on a semantic model in the workspace. Click on Write DAX queries from the top to the semantic model details page. And now you can write DAX queries using the DAX query view in the web. DAX query view is already available in Power BI Desktop, and most of the features are the same for web, with a few differences. DAX queries are discarded on close. DAX queries in Power BI Desktop are saved to the model and a semantic model may have DAX queries already saved in the model. DAX query view in the web currently will not display any previously saved DAX queries that may exist in the semantic model, and queries created in the web are not kept after you close the browser. Write DAX queries requires write permission on the semantic model. Workspace viewers will not be able to write DAX queries using this web experience in this milestone. Future updates will allow viewers to write DAX queries, but for now they will still have to use Power BI Desktop with live connection to the semantic model. DAX query view in web can be used on semantic models in import, DirectQuery, and Direct Lake mode. Microsoft Fabric customers already taking advantage of the new Direct Lake mode for Power BI now have the new measure editing capabilities of DAX query view available them through this web experience. Here is an example of using DAX query view in the web to add measures to a semantic model in Direct Lake mode. This example with work with Power BI semantic model in import or DirectQuery storage modes too. This demo semantic model has one billion (1,000,000,000) orders in the Sales fact table, one for each row. I already have a measure called Avg Profit Per Order which I can use the Quick queries in the context menu to Define with references and evaluate to see not only this measures DAX formula, but also the measures referenced in this measure with their DAX formulas. DAX query view converts these model measures to query scoped measures, and I can not only see all 5 of these measures used to calculate Avg Profit Per Order, but I can also make changes. These changes can be seen when I Run the DAX query but will not impact the existing measures in the model until I am ready to convert them back to model measures. I want to create a new measure to show the Avg Sales Per Order. This will be the same DAX pattern as Avg Profit Per Order so I want to first copy it then modify it to be for Sales. I can use the Command palette to find the shortcut to Copy Line Down to help me with this task. Now I only have to make two updates, one to change the name and the second to update [Profit] to [Sales]. When I am done, I can see this measure does not already exist in the model because of the CodeLens action text that shows between line 6 and 7 prompting me to Update model: Add new measure. I can test out this additional measure by clicking the Run and I see the result is as expected. I can also take the opportunity to improve the readability of all these measures with Format query ribbon button. I am happy with all the changes I have made and now I can use the Update model with changes (6) button to see I have 6 measure expressions that differ from the model expressions and to update them in a single click. After clicking Update model with changes, I can see the new measure in the Model Explorer of the Data pane to the right of the DAX editor. And I can remove the DEFINE block and run the DAX query again to see the results still. Without the DEFINE block I can always see the DAX formula of any measure being used in the query by hovering over it with my curser. When there is a DEFINE block for this measure, it will show both model DAX formula and query DAX formula, if they are different, too. If a measure description is provided, this shows as well. And the Fabric Copilot to help write and explain DAX queries is also available in DAX query view in the web. Learn more about DAX queries, DAX query view, Copilot to write and explain DAX queries, and any other limitations with DAX query view in web with these resources. DAX queries at https://learn.microsoft.com/dax/dax-queries Work with DAX query view at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/transform-model/dax-query-view Deep dive into DAX query view and writing DAX queries at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/blog/deep-dive-into-dax-query-view-and-writing-dax-queries/ Write DAX queries with Copilot at https://learn.microsoft.com/dax/dax-copilot Deep dive into DAX query view with Copilot at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/blog/deep-dive-into-dax-query-view-with-copilot/ Overview of Copilot for Power BI at https://learn.microsoft.com/power-bi/create-reports/copilot-introduction And keep letting us know your feedback with the Share feedback button in DAX query view. All the feedback so far has helped us greatly to keep delivering updates and bug fixes to DAX query view!
