Power BI Weekly

Issue #317 - 22nd July 2025

Plenty of great content this week. First of all, we've just been given the Power BI July 2025 Feature Summary which has a number of exciting updates. Unsurprisingly, there are loads of Copilot/AI updates generally extending the configurability and experiences of what you can do with Copilot in Power BI. Outside of AI, there are a number of great Reporting updates, including the ability to Influence sort for visual calculations (Preview), the General Availability of Field parameters, and the introduction of Organizational themes (Preview) (which apparently was announced last month on LinkedIn, which I missed). I'm particularly excited about the last update - an easy way to improve the consistency of reports across an organisation is a massive win.

There are a couple of relevant Fabric announcements this week. The first is the Introduction of access limits in a Fabric workspace - that is, you will no longer be allowed to have more than 1000 users+groups directly assigned to a workspace in Power BI/Fabric, which I can't imagine will be an issue for too many of us. The other announcement is the Sunsetting of Default Semantic Models – Microsoft Fabric, which has been a hot request from many in the community ever since Fabric was released. Default semantic models are those which are automatically created when you provision a Lakehouse in Fabric. There's currently no way to switch these off so they're not created in the first place, nor delete them when they're created. So this is welcome news!

Elsewhere this week, a couple of articles on more advanced Semantic Modeling features: Laura Graham-Brown has written about how Calculation Groups aren’t scary and Zoe Douglas has taken us through Perspectives in Power BI semantic models.