Power BI Weekly

Issue #304 - 22nd April 2025

Quite a few official articles this week. First of all, the FabCon Las Vegas keynote is now available to watch on YouTube, which includes most of the announcements that were shared at FabCon (if you haven't had a chance to read all the materials). Something that was highlighted in the keynote was Microsoft's strong performance in market analyses, and this week we've learned that Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2025 - congrats (as ever) to the Power BI team.

Probably more interesting news to this readership is the Power BI April 2025 Feature Summary. It's (unsurprisingly) quite a light one this month, but here are some highlights: there's now Ad hoc calculation support for data questions now available in read mode for Copilot, the Mobile layout auto-create functionality is now GA, and there are some model-layout-related updates to the Live edit of semantic models in Direct Lake mode with Power BI Desktop Preview feature. And on that last point, Zoe Douglas has provided a Deep dive into Direct Lake on OneLake and creating Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI Desktop for those that want to explore deeper.

Finally, I'd like to highlight that I'll be presenting the talk Microsoft Fabric: Too Many Options - Which One(s) Should I Choose? at the Oxford Microsoft Data Platform Group on 7th May (both online and in-person). There's "choice-overload" in Fabric - so I'll be implementing the same underlying data pipeline using different Microsoft Fabric item types and comparing and contrasting them for you. Would love to see you there (either physically or virtually!)