A handful of announcements and updates have been presented to us in preparation for Microsoft Build this week, and I dare say more are to come. You can find Arun's summary blog here: Unlock real-time insights with AI-powered analytics in Microsoft Fabric which includes an overview of some of the recent and upcoming innovations, and more generally, you can monitor all the Announcements on the Microsoft Fabric directly on the Fabric blog. Aside from Build, a very exciting announcement is that there is a new Microsoft Fabric Community Conference Europe to complement that which took place in Vegas a couple of months ago. It's taking place in Stockholm from September 24-27 (24th being a training day), and you can preregister now to receive a 50% discount code.

Over on the Power BI side, this week we've received the Power BI May 2024 Feature Summary, which includes new Layout modes for the Matrix visual (akin to those you get in Excel PivotTables), announces that the DAX Query View is now GA and highlights that there is now Git integration support for Direct Lake semantic models. Aside from the feature summary, Kim Manis has announced that Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now generally available in the Power BI experience (which, for those of you that are slightly lost in all the places the term "Copilot" is being used, corresponds mainly to the Copilot pane that is docked on the right-hand-side of reports in the Power BI Service (when it is enabled)).

Elsewhere this week, Antriksh Sharma has written a detailed article about Understanding how Time Intelligence functions are evaluated in Row Context, Davide Bacci has shared his Gantt 2.0 chart offering a suite of exciting new features, and Marco Russo has shared an entertaining video on Writing DAX with ChatGPT-4o – Unplugged #58, reinforcing the fact that these LLMs need to be guided, rather than using them to do all the work for you!