Power BI News and Blogs

Visual calculations (Generally Available) in Power BI, making it easier to add DAX calculations directly to the visual where they’re used.

Power BI reports continue to help analysts build secure, governed BI experiences on semantic models, while Fabric Apps expands what developers can create from the same trusted data.

Level: Beginners Original Post: November, 2016 It was only a few months after Power BI was born, that Matt first posted on this topic.  At that time, his focus was still primarily on Power Pivot in Excel, as Power BI was still in its infancy. Despite this, understanding when it [...]Read More »

Power BI Desktop Bridge (Preview)Power BI Desktop Bridge introduces a new way of working, allowing external applications and agents to interact directly with Power BI Desktop! What is Power BI Desktop Bridge?The bridge is a lightweight local server that lets external applications interact directly with Power BI Desktop. Think of it as a direct, […]

For as long as I’ve been using Power BI – which has been from the beginning – the advice about which storage mode to choose has been the same: use Import mode unless you have a really, really good reason to use DirectQuery mode and even then you’re probably wrong and should use Import mode. … Continue reading Power BI DirectQuery Mode: A […]

How to use sensitivity labels and Protection Policies to secure your Power BI estate — and why it matters more than ever in the age of AI. 

When you configure a Denodo data connection for Entra ID SSO, users querying a semantic model in DirectQuery mode are authenticated to Denodo with their own Microsoft Entra ID identity.

“Extreme DAX” by Michiel Rozema, Madzy Stikkelorum and Henk Vlootman Continuing my series of not-reviews of the latest Power BI-related books (and there are fewer and fewer of them being published) that I receive free copies of, here’s the second edition of a book that for some reason I missed first time around: “Extreme DAX”. … […]

If you use connectors like Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery in Power BI or Fabric, there’s an important change coming. Microsoft is moving from embedded ODBC drivers to ADBC, which affects how connections are established and managed. This post explains what’s changing, who’s impacted, and the steps you can take now to prepare.

When enabling Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on (SSo) for Starburst (Preview) report viewers querying semantic models in DirectQuery mode authenticate to Starburst with their own Entra ID identity, to Starburst's access policies — including row-level and column-level security rules — are evaluated against the actual end user rather than a […]

Author: Katie Murray, Senior Program Manager - Power BI continues to evolve with updates that make it easier to explore data, generate insights, and build more polished reports. This month’s release brings improvements across Copilot and AI experiences, reporting and modeling enhancements, new data connectivity flows, and updates to […]

Workspace outbound access protection (OAP) is a workspace-level control in Microsoft Fabric that lets you constrain where the data inside a workspace can flow. With this preview, OAP support now extends to Power BI reports. The good news for report authors and admins: there's nothing new to configure on the report itself. Protection comes from a […]

Announcing general availability of org apps in Power BI and Fabric, including one of the most requested capabilities: audiences.

Connecting Power BI to Oracle has historically meant extra provider installations and data gateway deployment — even for cloud-hosted databases. Two new Preview capabilities change that. Power BI Desktop now includes a bundled Oracle Managed ODP.NET provider, and the Power BI service supports direct cloud connections without the need for a data […]

Quite a few new Dataflows Gen2 features were released recently without much fanfare, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. I will take a look at them all in my next few posts; in this first post I’ll look at the ability to disable V-Order on staged data. As the (very detailed) documentation for this … Continue reading Improve […]

This month, we’re continuing to focus on making every day work a little easier—whether that’s building reports, modeling data, or just getting answers faster. You’ll see progress across Copilot and newer AI-driven experiences, along with a set of practical updates to reporting that help reduce repetitive work.

AI powered Power BI reporting skills is a collection of multiple skills that enables AI agents to automate report creation, from designing pages to publishing to Fabric. Now available through the Power BI authoring plugin  in Skills for Fabric —a first-party catalog of agent skills for Microsoft Fabric optimized for GitHub Copilot CLI—this […]

To finish off my series of posts on concurrent evaluation in Fabric Dataflows Gen2 (see part 1 and part 2) I decided to do some more realistic tests to see how much parallelism I could get. To do this I uploaded 244 identical Excel files containing almost 542000 rows of data each to a SharePoint … Continue reading Fabric Dataflows Gen2 And […]

Copilot in web modeling (Preview) in the Power BI service, is an AI-powered assistant helping you analyze and improve your semantic models using natural language so you can spend less time on manual edits. 

Microsoft Build 2026 brings the next generation of intelligent analytics to Power BI—where agents do the building, apps deliver insights everywhere, and the platform gets more powerful for every user.

Microsoft Build 2026 marks a major shift in how developers build data experiences with AI agents. Today we're announcing two capabilities that bring agentic analytics to the forefront: Agent Skills for Power BI, which let developers prompt an AI agent to build and refine semantic models and reports, and Fabric Apps for Semantic Models, which […]

DAX user-defined functions are now production-ready based on community feedback and internal validation. Their adoption during preview shows that DAX UDFs are quickly becoming a mainstay of Power BI semantic models.

In the first part of this series I showed how the Concurrency setting in a Fabric Dataflows Gen2 can affect refresh performance when there are multiple queries inside the dataflow. In this post I will show how, with Partitioned Compute, this setting can also affect the performance of a single query within a dataflow. To … Continue reading Fabric […]

Did you know that if your Fabric Dataflows Gen2 contains several queries then you can control how many of them are evaluated in parallel when your dataflow refreshes? In this series I’ll look at how how you can do this and how it may result in better performance – at least in some cases. Let’s … Continue reading Fabric Dataflows Gen2 And […]

Author: Winnie Li, Cloud Solution Architect