Power BI Weekly

Issue #358 - 19th May 2026

The Power BI May 2026 Feature Summary has arrived, and there's quite a lot that's reached GA. Visual calculations and custom totals reach general availability, as well as the the ability to set a report "landing page" (which is news to me). There's also a new option to set an Exploration perspective on a report, giving consumers a more focused field list when using the Explore feature on large models. Check out the summary - it's worth it this month!

Tbere are a few other official posts. Sara Lammini Rodriguez and Miguel Escobar have written up the new Power Query Get Data experience (Preview), a redesign of how you discover and connect to data sources in Desktop, creating a unified experience across Fabric, Desktop, and Excel. Also in preview, Kay Unkroth has detailed Outbound Access Protection for semantic models, a workspace-level security feature that blocks outbound network traffic by default and requires you to explicitly allowlist trusted destinations. Worth knowing: Power BI reports aren't covered yet; that's coming separately. Elsewhere, Roy Rubinstein has announced that creating support tickets from within Fabric is now generally available, and by June 2026 the old Power Platform Admin Portal path will be retired, so admins should take note. There's also a useful practical post on Power BI tenant migration trade-offs and realities, covering the kind of ground the official docs often gloss over.

On the community side, Marco Russo has published an in-depth look at user-aware calculated columns. As we know, this feature allows the calculated column to be evaluated at query time. Marco describes the use cases, covering localisation, mentioning virtual unmaterialised columns, and discussing an alternative to object-level security for sensitive data. Finally, Mim has revisited his 2022 post in Power BI with DuckDB, 4 years later. The original DirectQuery approach didn't hold up in production, but in 2026 things are considerably better thanks to MotherDuck's PostgreSQL endpoint and the new DuckDB Server extension, with a working (if still experimental) Power BI custom connector available.