Power BI Weekly

Issue #344 - 10th February 2026

In the past week we've had a few official updates, the most exciting of which being the General Availability of Semantic Link, which is a very welcome announcement! Semantic Link vastly simplifies your automation scenarios while interacting with various Fabric artifacts, and now it's fully supported and available on Spark Runtime 2.0. Sadly it's still only a subset of functionality supported in Semantic Link Labs, but naturally that library can move at a pace of innovation that is hard to mirror for a fully supported service in an Enterprise platform like Fabric. Still, great news! Elsewhere this week, we've been told about the Deprecation of old Excel and CSV import experience in Power BI Service and the new ability to perform a Manual update for on-premises data gateway (Preview), which is the first step towards a fully automated update experience for your Gateways. A sigh of relief for many admins, I should think!

On the community front this week, I'd like to highlight a few articles from across the Power BI topic-spectrum. Firstly, Jen Stirrup has written about the recently-revealed phishing attacks utilising the Power BI Subscription feature, of which I was not aware. Jen ties this back into your Governance practices (both business processes and technical processes) to give some great tips as to how to guard against these types of attacks as best as possible. Onto some more blogs: Ben Gribaudo is back enlightening me of more Power Query (M) features I wasn't aware of: Table Interceptors. These are particularly helpful when overriding transformations that can't be natively folded on your source, but you can implement a custom handler that can do just that. Finally, Nicky van Vroenhoven has written a informative blog on Transitioning to the New Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) - What You Need to Know, particularly worth reading if you're a tenant admin and not entirely sure of the consequences of doing so.