Power BI Weekly

Issue #354 - 21st April 2026

We have received the Power BI April 2026 Feature Summary, although it is quite thin-on-the-ground. There are a couple of interesting Modeling updates in preview regarding Direct Lake calculated columns & tables and User context aware calculated columns, and then some small visual updates such as the Fixed size layout for card, button slicer, and list slicer visuals. Outside of the feature summary, we've been told about the GA of Translytical Task Flows which is great news for those invested in Fabric, but for those still using just Power BI, Power Apps are still your go-to write-back option!

Elsewhere this week, Ben Gribaudo has reflected on the Dataflows Gen1 impending "retirement" announcement, in the blog Goodbye Dataflows, For Some?. There was quite the uproar over in Reddit Dataflow Gen1 officially marked as Legacy today — Pro users left with no migration path unless they pay for Fabric (and another thread here: Retirement of Dataflows Gen1) which has prompted the Power BI team to update their original blog Dataflows: Thank you for eight years of Gen1—and why Gen2 is the future with a bit more reassurance that "Gen1 ...remains supported and existing workloads can continue to run as-is". Worth re-reading if you depend on Gen1 today!

Finally, Marco Russo has shared a useful deep dive in Understanding parameter types in DAX user-defined functions UDF for those wanting a comprehensive understanding of UDFs, and Chris Webb has discussed the newly-exposed Power BI Semantic Model Refresh Warnings which can help you ensure your semantic models remain in a healthy state.