Power BI Weekly
Issue #323 - 2nd September 2025
A pretty quiet week all round - no announcements and only a handful of content. Here are the bits of content I'd like to highlight this week: firstly, Marcus Wegener has shared a PoC he put together to show the art of the possible around creating Portable Power BI Dashboard Templates with Fabric Notebooks PoC, whereby you create a "template" report with placeholder objects that are then remapped to target objects using sempy, which eventually spits out a report. A great efficiency boost for cookie-cutter reports that you can easily use configuration to rebind to a new model. Chris Webb has written a new version of a blog written a couple of years ago around Performance Testing Power BI Direct Lake Models: Ensuring Worst-Case Performance after some recent improvements to the Direct Lake engine have changed how this works. Finally, Reza Rad has provided us with a useful Microsoft Fabric Org App VS Power BI App comparison video, describing the key differences and the implications of the new "org app" approach from an architectural perspective.
🛠️ Data Prep
- Chandeep Chhabra (@chandeep2786) describes 7 Power Query Tricks
- Avi Singh - Powerbipro describes How to Show Refresh 🔄 Time for Each Data Source in Power BI 📊
- On the RADACAD YouTube channel, Reza Rad (@RADACAD_COM) explains how to Develop Power BI Solution Faster with this Power Query Parameter Trick
🧩 Data Modeling
- On the SQLBI blog, Marco Russo (@marcorus) walks through Using VALUES in iterators
- Bas Dohmen (@HowToPowerBI) writes about Faster DAX in Power BI
- On the Learning Science YouTube channel, Learning Science (@learn_scitech) explains How to calculate growth Month Over Month (MoM) in Power BI
📊 Report Authoring and Interactivity
- Jon Stjernegaard Vöge blogs about Passing visual selections to Translytical Task Flows with DAX
- Philipp Lenz (@lenz_philipp) describes How do I update a record in a table within Power BI using Translytical Dataflows
- On the Power BI community blog, Shannon Lindsay (@shan_gsd) announces the finalists of the Power BI DataViz World Champs EU Edition
- Valerie Junk (@porcubi) talks about Power BI Template Files - PBIT
🚀 Deployment, Security and Operations
- On the Power BI community blog, Rejaul Islam Royel writes Stop Building Multiple Apps – Master Power BI App Audiences Instead
- On the RADACAD YouTube channel, Reza Rad (@RADACAD_COM) talks about Microsoft Fabric Org App VS Power BI App
- Chris Webb (@cwebb_bi) covers Performance Testing Power BI Direct Lake Models Revisited: Ensuring Worst-Case Performance
- Marcus Wegener (@PowerBIler) writes about Portable Power BI Dashboard Templates with Fabric Notebooks (PoC)
🌐 General
- On the BIFocal podcast, John White and Jason Himmelstein (@bifocalshow) talk about Episode 302 - Power BI August 2025 Feature Summary