Power BI Weekly

Issue #308 - 20th May 2025

Welcome to the 308th edition of Power BI Weekly! Sorry it's a bit late, but it's a bigger one than usual, what with Microsoft Build this week. If you're interested in all the announcements across Microsoft's services, check out the Book of news which has a big old article describing all the main announcements and developments. Naturally, there's been plenty of announcements in the Power BI and Fabric offerings too. Those announcements relating to Power BI are as follows:

• Translytical task flows (Preview) - the feature that was teased last year at Ignite. The native ability to "write-back" (and much more) in Power BI.
• The next era of Copilot in Power BI: Chat with your Data (Preview) - new dedicated Copilot experience in the Power BI/Fabric interface (yes, you needed another one). See also: Extracting deeper insights with Fabric Data Agents in Copilot in Power BI
• Updates to Fabric Copilot Capacity - now available to F2 capacities and above, and a new admin setting being switched "on" by default.

And on the topic of Copilot, Jeffrey Wang has written a fascinating article about LLMs and DAX: Where Things Stand Today after last week's article highlighting the improvement of Copilot's DAX capabilities. The whole article's worth a read, but Jeffrey's ever-wise words stand-out at the end: "...remember that the smartest move you can make is the same one Power BI experts have always preached: invest in a clean, well-structured semantic model."

Now, moving on. We've also received the Power BI May 2025 Feature Summary this week! The main thing they've drawn our attention to is the new Power BI section of the Fabric Roadmap (preview), which gives us a clear view as to what features are being worked on behind the scenes (across all of Fabric, not just Power BI). There are also a bunch more Copilot & AI updates, including a new "Prep data for AI" experience in Power BI Desktop that you may have seen appear over the last few days. Other announcements this month include Persisted sorting for field parameters (Preview), and a Deep dive into selection expressions for calculation groups, given you further control about how Calc Groups behave when multiple items are selected, or no item is selected.

Finally this week, I wanted to highlight a number of new endjin blogs. First of all, a couple of blog posts from my brilliant colleague Paul, who wrote a blog taking us through How to Build Mobile Navigation in Power BI, and also provided a A Creative Walkthrough of our Titanic Power BI Report, a brilliant demonstration how some professional design thinking can level up your reports. For those bridging into Data Engineering (especially on Fabric), my colleague Carmel has written a trio of blog posts touching on some of the modern foundations, with the articles: What is a Data Lakehouse?, How do Data Lakehouses Work? An Intro to Delta Lake and What is the Medallion Architecture? Finally, my (ex) colleague Liam has now moved on to pastures new, but not without writing the article Retrospecting on my career at endjin. If you're interested in learning more about what a role at endjin looks like, please take a read of Liam's blog. We wish him all the best!