Power BI Weekly

Issue #350 - 24th March 2026

This week we have all the FabCon related Power BI content, in case you missed anything last week. The main blog, written by Arun Ulag, can be found here: FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single data platform, putting databases right at the forefront of this year's messaging. You won't see much Power BI content in there, but if you're using Fabric (which I'm sure many of you are), it's well worth taking a read of that to get your summary. If you want the Power BI round-up, then that's been written by Mohammad Ali, titled: Semantic Layers: The foundation of enterprise AI, highlighting the main announcements:

• The GA of Translytical Task Flows
• The desperately-needed "Modern visual defaults" (see a deep dive here: Deep Dive into Modern Visual Defaults and Customizing Theme Improvements (Preview)). By default, reports now look much slicker and aesthetically pleasing (IMHO)
• The preview of Report Copilot for Mobile
• The introduction of TMDL View on the Web (Preview), bringing the power of scripted changes to your model into the browser, where Version History is supported and previewing changes is supported through the "View" mode
• The GA Direct Lake on OneLake
• The Preview of Direct Lake Calculated Columns, including a new "user-context aware" capability which allows for "dynamic" columns based on user-specific DAX functions like UserCulture(), UserPrincipalName(), and CustomData() 🤯
• The GA of various Table Visual Updates (including new, easy options for overriding totals)

Even more updates can be found in the Power BI March 2026 Feature Summary, which was also released last week. Another announcement over on the Fabric blog was the GA of the On-premises data gateway auto-update (admin triggered), enabling on-demand manual or programmatic updates to your Gateway. And today we've been told about the GA of Workspace Tags, providing even more options for organising and describing your workspaces.

Finally, a couple of non-FabCon bits of content this week. Just Blindbæk has written an interesting blog about how to use and abuse the Semantic Model Scale-out feature to Reduce Refresh Memory on Large semantic model in Microsoft Fabric, by effectively clearing the model's data before re-hydrating it with your data. Elsewhere, Ben Gribaudo has shown a way to achieve Less GUIDs: Relative Current Workspace & Items By Name. If anyone has used a Dataflow Gen2 or Power Query to retrieve items from a Lakehouse, you'll benefit from Ben's trick highlighted in that article!

If you're interested in all things Microsoft Fabric, don't forget to sign up for our new newsletter Fabric Weekly. We'll be moving all Fabric content over from Azure Weekly in the near future. Don't worry - Power BI Weekly is remaining as-is, for the Power BI purists out there!