Power BI Weekly
Issue 364
30th June 2026
A very light edition this week, with the one official announcement being the Power BI Desktop Bridge (Preview) by Sara Lammini Rodriguez, which allows external apps interact with Power BI Desktop for real-time tasks like checking report status, reloading files, and capturing screenshots. This is big news for any agents you use to build/maintain your reports, as they can now "speak" to Power BI Desktop to validate actions that they're taking.
Elsewhere this week, Teo Lachev has highlighted the main benefit of the new Power BI Date Picker, which is that the slicer rolls forward to the latest available date with data, thus preventing empty insights (which was the issue with the previous "workarounds" one had to use). Finally, Paul Turley has covered Power BI Copilot, Data Agent Optimization & Performance, the first of (hopfully) multiple blogs providing tips about how to get the best out of Copilot and other Agents that answering questions about data in your semantic models/data stores.
Finally, I'd like to highlight the brand new Fabric Weekly newsletter. It's been a long time coming and we'd love for you to sign-up, if you're interested. Naturally, I will continue to share any Fabric content that's directly related to Power BI in this newsletter. But if you're interested in keeping in touch with the wider goings-on in Fabric, then do subscribe to Fabric Weekly.
Data Prep
- How to Build Queries That Don’t Break This guide shows how to make Power Query queries more robust by eliminating hard coding, covering dynamic column expansion, nested tables handling, Change Type fixes, missing columns management, and case sensitivity issues.
Data Modeling
- DAX Fundamentals Part 3: The Patterns That Make Reports Work This DAX Fundamentals Part 3 video covers time intelligence functions, variables, and calculation groups to enhance report building and performance.
- When to Create a Lookup Table in Power BI This beginner’s guide explains how lookup tables enhance data consistency and performance in Power BI.
- Copo de nieve vs Estrella: Cuál esquema es realmente más rápido en Power BI? [Spanish] This tutorial shows how to convert a snowflake schema to a star schema in Power BI for better DAX performance and faster reports using optimization…
- DAX RANK, RANKX & TOPN in Power BI This Power BI tutorial clarifies why RANKX outperforms TOPN for slicer compatibility, showing step-by-step how to implement dynamic Top N rankings with DAX while avoiding common ranking pitfalls in dashboards.
Report Authoring and Interactivity
- Power BI Desktop Bridge (Preview) Power BI Desktop Bridge (Preview) lets external apps interact with Power BI Desktop for real-time tasks like checking report status, reloading files, and capturing screenshots.
- Power BI Date Picker The new Power BI Date Picker slicer rolls forward to the latest available date with data, preventing empty insights.
Deployment, Security and Operations
- Power BI Copilot, Data Agent Optimization & Performance Power BI Copilot and Data Agent optimizations aim to enhance performance while exploring whether agentic analytics via chat will complement rather than replace traditional dashboard reporting for most business users.
General
- How Data Apps make semantic models better in Fabric Data apps in Fabric simplify semantic models, easing report building and maintenance while boosting compatibility with conversational BI tools.
- Self Service Analytics with AI - Ep.536 - Power BI tips Anthropic’s Claude AI enables users to perform complex data analysis and generate insights directly within Power BI, streamlining self-service analytics workflows.
- Self Service with AI Part 2- Ep.540 - Power BI tips Anthropic’s Claude AI enables users to perform complex Power BI data analysis through natural language prompts, streamlining self-service analytics.
- I let Microsoft’s AI skills design me a Power BI report... Edward shows how Microsoft's AI Skills automate Power BI report creation from concept to deployment.