Power BI Weekly
Issue 375
18th September 2026
Welcome to the 375th edition of Power BI Weekly! From the team, Microsoft has released a self-serve ODBC-to-ADBC migration scanner, which inventories your ODBC connections across Power BI Desktop and the Fabric service and flags which ones are safe to move to ADBC now versus which need a closer look first. Worth running even if you're not planning to migrate imminently, just to see where you stand.
Over in the community, Ignacio Barrau has shown two hover effects for Power BI buttons, using bookmarks and a bit of invisible-character trickery to make button states feel closer to what we're used to on the web. And Chris Webb has put together a handy DAX query for finding out what changed in your semantic model, and when, using the ModifiedTime column exposed by the DAX INFO functions. My personal highlight this week: it's the kind of thing you'll wish you had bookmarked the next time someone insists nothing changed right before your report ground to a halt.
Data Prep
- Moving off ODBC — A self-serve scanner for your ADBC migration The pq-adbc-advisor tool helps enterprises quickly inventory and prioritize ODBC connections for migration to ADBC, providing risk classifications and recommended fixes to streamline the transition.
Data Modeling
- Diferencia de tiempo en Power BI: domina fechas y horas paso a paso [Spanish] Learn to master date and time calculations in Power BI using both decimal numbers and the DATEDIFF function, with step-by-step guidance on two practical approaches.
- I Turned Six Sigma into a DAX Library DataTides.SixSigma provides a Power BI DAX UDF library with Six Sigma statistical tools for analyzing process variation and capability.
- I built a CLI so I’d stop getting my own DAX Lib PRs wrong Daxlib-audit-cli validates DAX Lib packages for convention adherence such as proper TABLEREF usage, consistent function names, complete documentation, and annotation uniformity before pull requests.
- Find What Changed And When In Your Power BI Semantic Model Power BI's INFO functions show the exact date and time of the last modification for measures, calculated columns, and other model objects to help identify recent performance issues.
- Conversational Analytics in Fabric and Power BI | Fabric Insider Ep. 19 | Nellie Gustafsson Nellie Gustafsson explains how conversational analytics in Microsoft Fabric uses semantic models to deliver trustworthy AI answers, emphasizing business context and guiding Power BI developers on model preparation for Copilot integration.
Report Authoring and Interactivity
- Mouse over effects for buttons Mouse over effects for buttons introduce underlining and motion spacing techniques to enhance button selection visibility, using invisible characters to simulate text movement when hovering.
- No More Workarounds! 🤯 Power BI Single Date Slicer and Default Date to Today is Here Power BI's Date Picker slicer now supports single-date selection combined with relative-date anchors like "This Day" or "Yesterday," removing the need for the manual workarounds previously required to build a dynamic single-date slicer.
- Power BI Smart Table Visual: Excel style Column Filtering, Dynamic Column Headers, Grouping Columns The Smart Table visual for Power BI adds Excel-style column filtering, dynamic headers from DAX measures, and column grouping without additional tables, improving data interaction though it has row caps and nuanced filter behaviors.
- Building an APCA Contrast Checker in Power BI: A Perceptual Approach to Accessible Colour APCA provides a more detailed method than WCAG by accounting for text orientation, thickness, size, and dark mode impacts, possibly identifying problematic readability issues not caught by WCAG.
- Finally Added Freeze Rows to Power BI Matrix Visual | Like Excel! | New Power BI Feature | The newly added Freeze Rows feature in Power BI Matrix visuals lets users keep row headers visible while scrolling, enhancing report usability and making Power BI more Excel-like.
- Agentic AI in Power BI and Fabric, Part 5: Building a Power BI Theme Audit Agent Continuing a series on agentic AI in Power BI, this post turns a manual Power BI theme-auditing workflow into a reusable custom agent that runs against a Fabric tenant, checking it follows the legacy PBIR fallback, logs each run, and asks for approval before publishing changes.
Deployment, Security and Operations
- How to Refresh Only One Table in a Power BI Semantic Model (Full Guide) This video shows how to refresh specific tables or partitions in a Power BI model using Power BI Desktop and the Service's Fabric Pipeline for better performance.
- OneLake Security: Setting Up Row Level Security From Lakehouse to Report OneLake security enables defining row level security centrally so all downstream objects automatically inherit the configuration, simplifying governance across Fabric.
- Source control for semantic models: deploy it right (part 1) This guide introduces using Git with Azure DevOps or GitHub to build a searchable history of changes to Power BI semantic models, starting by saving the model in the plain-text, Git-friendly PBIP format rather than PBIX.
- Refresh Power BI Dataset with a Button Using Power Automate 🔥 This video demonstrates how to automate Power BI dataset refreshes with a single button using Power Automate, eliminating manual scheduling and instantly updating data for stakeholders.
General
- Ep. 30 - Telling Stories with Data In this episode, Santhana Lakshmi Ponnurasan shares insights on creating practical data reports, her journey as a Power BI DataViz champion, and tips for engaging with the Fabric community.
- Power BI Copilot: EVERY Feature Explained (2026 Complete Guide) Power BI Copilot’s 2026 complete guide details every feature, from report assistance and organizational apps to mobile usage, explaining how each enhances data analysis workflows.