Power BI News and Blogs

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

Why Star Schema Matters More Than Ever in the Age of AI It was over a decade ago that Matt first posted on The Optimal Shape for Power BI Data.  Throughout the years since, Matt consistently promoted this as one of the most important lessons he taught Power BI users [...]Read More »

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 […]

Authored by: Sara Lammini Rodriguez - Product Manager II, and Miguel Escobar - Senior Product Manager

 Author: Kay Unkroth, Principl Program Manager - Outbound Access Protection (OAP) is a workspace-level network security and governance feature that blocks outbound traffic from a workspace by default and lets you allow only the destinations you explicitly trust. With this preview, you can now extend OAP to semantic models. Power BI reports aren't […]

If you have a lot of Power BI semantic models that are scheduled to refresh at the same time in the Service then you may find that some of them fail with the following error: You’ve exceeded the capacity limit for dataset refreshes. Try again when fewer datasets are being processed. [Note: “dataset” is the … Continue reading Understanding […]

Welcome to the April Power BI update!Power BI’s April 2026 update is here, bringing continued improvements across Copilot and AI, reporting, visuals, and modeling. This release includes more flexibility when working with layouts and visuals, expanded Copilot experiences—especially on mobile—and several preview features that continue to […]

This is a very late addition to the series of posts I wrote back in 2024 and which started here on Power BI memory errors. It’s about a very rare error that is hard to deal with and often temporary but since people do run into it from time to time I decided to write … Continue reading Power BI Semantic Model Memory Errors, Part 5: The […]

Author: Kay Unkroth - Principal Program Manager 

Author: Kay Unkroth - Principal Program Manager

Did you know that you can configure your Power BI semantic model so that it automatically binds to a data source connection when you publish? To illustrate how to do this, I created an Import mode Power BI semantic model in Power BI Desktop connected to the Products table in the ContosoSales sample database in … Continue reading Connecting Power […]

Back in December the FabricAI.Prompt() M function was released in Fabric Dataflows Gen2. Most of the people writing about it at that time, as in this great post by my colleague Sandeep Pawar, focused on calling this function for each row in a table – something that the UI in the editor makes easy. However … Continue reading Generating Sample […]

Translytical task flows take interactive Power BI reports to the next level where users can update records, add annotations, and trigger actions in external systems—all without leaving the report. With translytical task flows, report consumers become active participants. Instead of viewing data and then switching to another application to take […]

Since March 2026, Power BI semantic models have started showing warnings in their Refresh History in the Service. This has scared a few people but in fact all that is happening is that errors which were there all along and which don’t prevent refreshes from completing are now being flagged. Documentation on this feature can … Continue reading […]

I’ve been working with Microsoft BI tools for 28 years now and for all that time Microsoft has been consistent in its belief that semantic models are a good thing. Fashions have changed and at different times the wider BI industry has agreed and disagreed with this belief; right now, semantic models are cool again … Continue reading Power BI […]

Back in September 2024 I wrote a blog post on how to create multiple copies of the same dimension in a Direct Lake semantic model without creating copies of the underlying Delta table. Not long after that I started getting comments that people who tried following my instructions were getting errors, and while some bugs … Continue reading […]