Power BI Weekly

Issue #278 - 1st October 2024

It was FabCon last week - I hope those of you that went had a great time. Naturally, there have been a lot of announcements in both the Fabric and the Power BI space. The usual summary blog can be found here: European Fabric Community Conference 2024: Building an AI-powered data platform with the more granular details found, as ever, on the Fabric blog (there are 7 pages of updates just from the last week!). My personal highlights on the Fabric side are the announcements around Python User Data Functions in Data Pipelines (making it easier to call your custom Python functions in your pipeline) and Organizing your tables with lakehouse schemas (giving extra flexibility to how you structure your Lakehouse objects). Great new features (both in Preview)!

On the Power BI side, arguably the biggest news is that Dark mode is now available in Power BI Desktop, which has been a feature request probably just as long as Power BI Desktop has been around! I think it'll take a bit of getting used to, even for those who have been asking for it... We've also been told about the Enhanced Report Creation in the Power BI Service with Copilot, and been told how to Connect your data to the real world with the power of NFC and the Power BI Mobile Apps. There have also been the monthly feature summaries for both Power BI Report Server and plain old Power BI, with the standard Power BI feature summary elaborating on a couple of the points mentioned in the FabCon blog: including the new ability to have Multiple org apps per workspace (wahoo!) and being able to Live edit semantic models in Direct Lake mode with Power BI Desktop, bringing the familiar model development experience back to Desktop instead of having to do it in the browser. Much more convenient.