Power BI Weekly

Welcome to the 367th edition of Power BI Weekly! Zoe Douglas has shared a couple more deep dives this week around two preview features: the new modern visual defaults and report-wide theming, which finally gives you a centralised place (colours, typography, visual styles, page settings, filter pane) to style a whole report rather than fiddling with each visual's formatting pane individually, and the new date picker slicer, which lets authors set dynamic relative date ranges (last 30 days and similar) that keep rolling forward as data refreshes, while still letting viewers pick their own custom ranges.

On the AI side, Sara Vredevoogd has announced that Power BI insights are now reachable from every Microsoft 365 Copilot user, via Copilot Chat and the newer Copilot Cowork, without needing to open Power BI at all. Cowork is pay-per-use rather than a flat license, which is a change from the usual Copilot licensing story, though the success of the whole feature depends on how well-modelled your semantic layer is.

Sticking with the Copilot theme, James Serra has put together a handy rundown of what each Copilot actually does and where it fits, useful if (like most of us) you've lost track of which Copilot is which. And finally, John Kerski has gone deep on building an Apache Arrow parser for the ExecuteDaxQueries endpoint, working around Power Query's lack of native Arrow support to unlock the native data typing and INFO function support that the newer endpoint offers over the legacy ExecuteQueries. Worth a read if you're doing anything programmatic with DAX queries ingested into Power BI reports.