Power BI Weekly
Issue 369
4th August 2026
Amir Jafari has announced that the Fabric data agent integration in Copilot for Power BI is being retired on August 26, 2026, a casualty of the OpenAI Assistant API being phased out. The data agents themselves live on via Foundry, Copilot Studio, 365 Copilot, or MCP, so it's just this particular door that's closing.
Elsewhere from the team, Zoe Douglas has a deep dive into conditional formatting for lines and legends, letting colors be driven by gradients, rules, or field values and stay correct automatically as data changes. Goutham Upadhyaya has also covered a new opt-in modern evaluation engine for VNet data gateways (preview), promising faster refreshes and DirectQuery cold-starts.
On the community side, Chris Webb has tried analyzing Power BI semantic model data from Copilot in Excel, and reckons it may end up the most popular way people interact with semantic models, simply because it lives inside Excel. Finally, Juliana Smith has a great, if lengthy, piece on detecting anomalies in time series with DAX UDFs, covering five statistical tests and how to wire each into reusable measures.
Data Prep
- Question Marks in Power Query Learn how the question mark in Power Query’s M language prevents query failures from missing columns or rows and provides null fallback values for more robust data transformations.
Data Modeling
- Outlier Detection Done Right: Five Statistical Tests and DAX UDFs This article introduces five statistical tests and Power BI DAX UDFs for detecting unusual year-on-year changes in time series data.
- Working with AI coding agents alongside TE3 Tabular Editor 3 integrates AI coding agents with workflows from TMDL metadata to workspace mode, emphasizing version control and tools like the TE CLI and MCP servers to prevent conflicts.
- DAX UDFs, Query REST API & Outbound Access Protection | Fabric Insider Ep. 13 | Kay Unkroth In this Fabric Insider episode, Kay Unkroth explains how DAX User Defined Functions solve common calculation needs, demonstrating real-world use cases and detailing the new REST API with enhanced Outbound Access Protection.
Report Authoring and Interactivity
- Deep dive into conditional formatting for lines and legends Power BI’s new conditional formatting features for lines and legends ensure visual consistency by automatically updating when underlying data changes.
- How to Create a Rounded Bar Chart in Power BI (No Custom Visuals) Learn to craft a Rounded Bar Chart in Power BI using native features and Error Bars, without needing any custom visuals, as part of a Healthcare Dashboard tutorial.
- Power BI Accent Bars: Conditional Formatting for Card Visuals Explained Learn how accent bars in Power BI card visuals subtly indicate positive or negative values via conditional formatting and DAX measures.
- Agentic AI in Power BI and Fabric, Part 4: From Skills to an Agentic Report Theme Audit Workflow This article details how Power BI and Fabric leverage agentic AI to automate a report theme audit workflow, integrating skills and guardrails for enhanced data analysis.
- Analysing Power BI Data Using Copilot In Excel Power BI users can now use Copilot in Excel for analyses such as ABC analysis on semantic model data, creating worksheets with raw data and formulas while applying corporate branding through built-in skills.
- How to Create Custom Geographic Regions in Power BI? | Shape Map in Power BI Discover how to leverage Power BI’s Shape Map visual for interactive geographic data representation, ideal for sales analysis and regional reporting.
Deployment, Security and Operations
- Evaluate Fabric workload performance with the modern evaluation engine for VNet data gateways (Preview) Microsoft Fabric VNet data gateways now offer an opt-in execution path that improves refresh speeds and cold-start performance for semantic models and Dataflow Gen2.
- The Hidden Architecture of Power BI Publishing Explained Power BI converts a local PBIX file into cloud assets like models, reports, metadata, and connections for collaboration, updates, refreshes, and security.
- Power BI Scheduled Refresh | How to Set Up, Monitor & Fix Errors Power BI Service automates data updates by configuring gateways and monitoring refresh histories to resolve common connection failures.
General
- Retirement of Fabric data agent integration in Copilot in Power BI The Fabric data agent integration will retire in Copilot for Power BI on August 26, 2026, due to the OpenAI Assistant API's impending retirement, though Fabric data agents remain available via Foundry, Copilot Studio, and 365 Copilot.
- How to Build a Clean P&L in Power BI Building a clean Profit & Loss in Power BI involves extracting data from Xero, preparing it in Excel by filtering for revenue and expense transactions, and then loading the cleaned datasets into Power BI to create dynamic measures and polished visualizations.
- BI in the Age of AI - Ep.550 - Power BI tips Microsoft earns its 19th consecutive Gartner Magic Quadrant leadership position while data teams navigate the growing complexity of AI agents in the Power BI and Fabric ecosystems.