Power BI Weekly

Issue #346 - 24th February 2026

Another small edition this week, so I'll only highlight a couple of articles. First of all, Marc Lelijveld has shown how you can use the Power BI MCP server along with GitHub Copilot to Generate ERD diagrams for your Power BI Semantic Model, whereby a draw.io diagram is created which can be edited and easily reused across projects. The interesting thing here is that, at least initially, the tool assumes you already have a Power BI model. But what about the Entity Relationship Diagrams created during design phase (before even your reporting lakehouse/database has been created)? What tools do you all use to visualize and document your data models ahead of time? The beauty of GenAI means that even without the MCP Server that interacts with your semantic model, you could still use GitHub Copilot (or other GenAI tool) to generate an ERD, provided you've given it enough context about your semantic model (such as a data dictionary). But how do you create them? Do you use Mermaid diagrams? Visio? draw.io? Miro/Mural? Would love to hear what tools you prefer!

The second article I'd like to highlight is another by Jen Stirrup, who has written about style over substance in the blog Is Your Power BI a Spotlight or an Instagram Filter? Jen stresses the importance of not "sweeping issues under the rug", suggesting that identifying and addressing flaws in your E2E data pipeline is a necessary and natural part of a report's lifecycle, and that "touching up" reports often causes fundamental issues in your report's data model/visualizations, or worse, confusion in the end-user's interpretation of your reports. Worth a read!