Power BI Weekly

Issue 379

16^th October 2026

We have received the Power BI October 2026 Feature Summary, which is a fairly light one after last month's FabCon-sized update. The most exciting item IMHO is the new native Gantt chart visual, which should mean fewer of you need an AppSource visual just to show a project schedule! Also from the team this week are updates on the Databricks ADBC connector, which is now generally available, and the Amazon Redshift V2 connector.

There's been a lot of talk about Claude Dashboards since they launched recently. Ruben Van de Voorde and Kurt Buhler have written a helpful overview in What are Claude Dashboards?, covering where they sit alongside Fabric Apps and why a well-governed semantic model decides how quickly you can adopt front ends like this. Bas Dohmen has walked through connecting Claude Dashboards to a Power BI semantic model so Claude can read the tables, relationships and measures you've already built. Ilya Rzhevskiy has shared his first try at Claude Dashboards, building one in around 30 minutes and noting what's still missing compared to Power BI.

Finally, Eugene Meidinger has laid out an incremental path to CI/CD maturity for report development, from PBIP and basic Git through to automated testing (handy for containing any mess an AI agent leaves behind (or, more realistically, any mess a human leaves behind)).

Data Prep

Databricks ADBC connector for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric (Generally Available) by Michaela Isaacs · 3 min read The Databricks and Azure Databricks connectors' new ADBC driver is now generally available, replacing the Simba Spark ODBC driver with better security and faster large-dataset fetching via Arrow. Existing connections keep working; you can opt in per connection (Implementation="2.0"), per workspace, or tenant-wide. The Power BI service will move from ODBC to ADBC through Q1 2027, so Microsoft recommends validating key reports now.
Amazon Redshift V2 Connector for Microsoft Data Factory by Michaela Isaacs · 1 min read Microsoft is moving its Amazon Redshift connectors to the Amazon Redshift ODBC 2.x driver, rolling out automatically across regions. The change affects Power BI Desktop, semantic models and the gateway as well as Dataflows Gen2 and Fabric pipelines, and adds metadata visibility for external objects, Redshift Data Sharing reads and connection auditing. Enable preview features to test it early.
Calculating Min-Max Normalization in PowerBI by Dinesh Asanka · 3 min read Dinesh Asanka shows how to apply Min-Max normalization in Power BI to rescale metrics with different units (such as revenue, complaints and delivery time) onto a common 1–5 scale, with both a DAX calculated column and a Power Query custom column, and then present the normalized values in gauge visuals.

Data Modeling

DAX Functions Crash Course: The 20% You’ll Use 80% of the Time by Chandeep Chhabra This DAX crash course covers the most frequently used 20% of functions across six key categories with Power BI examples.
ApproximateDistinctCount In Power BI Is Sometimes Slower Than DistinctCount by Chris Webb · 2 min read ApproximateDistinctCount in Power BI may be slower than DistinctCount on low-cardinality columns due to different engine optimizations.
Co je dbt a proč by mělo zajímat Power BI vývojáře [Czech] by Jiří Neoral · 6 min read Written for Power BI developers eyeing Fabric, this Czech-language post explains what dbt is and how Fabric's dbt jobs run it against a Warehouse or Lakehouse. Its focus is column descriptions: keep them in YAML beside the SQL models (persist_docs fails on the Warehouse adapter but works on Lakehouse), then have an agent using the Power BI Authoring MCP server carry them into a Direct Lake semantic model, reporting mismatches rather than copying them blindly.

Report Authoring and Interactivity

What are Claude Dashboards? Analyzing and visualizing data with Anthropic's Claude.ai by Ruben Van de Voorde, Kurt Buhler · 1 min read Claude Dashboards leverage MCP servers to visualize live data, though enterprise governance concerns currently limit their use to personal or small-team BI scenarios.
Claude Dashboards on Your Power BI Semantic Model (Full Setup) by Bas Dohmen The video demonstrates how to seamlessly integrate Claude Dashboards with an existing Power BI semantic model, enabling AI-driven insights directly within familiar Power BI workflows.
Claude Dashboards First Try: You Design With Words, Not the Mouse by Ilya Rzhevskiy · 1 min read Claude Dashboards enables rapid prototyping of data visualizations via natural language, though it lacks the deep enterprise integration and complex modeling capabilities of Power BI.
Claude Dashboards vs Power BI: What Skills Still Matter in 2026 by Atikant Jain While Claude can quickly generate dashboards from natural language, essential skills like data integration, medallion architecture layers, star schema design, AI readiness, security governance, and Fabric Apps remain crucial in 2026.
Claude + Power BI Data for Business Users: Fabric IQ MCP Server Setup & Demo by Reza Rad Reza Rad connects Claude to a Power BI semantic model through the Fabric IQ MCP Server so business users can ask questions of governed data in plain language. He explains how the server's read-only tools find content, read schemas and run DAX under the user's own permissions (with RLS and OLS still applied), then walks through the Entra ID app registration and Claude setup before a full live demo.
ChatGPT Astra + Power BI | Report Planning and Design 🔥 | Part 5 by Pankaj Namekar Part 5 of a series using ChatGPT Astra alongside Power BI focuses on planning a report before building it: defining purpose and audience, mapping KPIs to business requirements, choosing visuals, and sketching page layout, navigation and styling as a wireframe-level plan to cut down on later revisions.
Microsoft Fabric Apps: Inventory & Forecast App with Write-Back by Valerie Junk Valerie Junk shows how she turned a Power BI report into an inventory management and forecasting Fabric App with write-back to a Fabric SQL database, built by prompting Claude Code. She covers the prerequisites (a trusted semantic model, a Fabric App and a SQL database), her prompt and brief, and the finished app's stock, orders, mobile stock counts, forecasts and budgets, customer warnings, discount approvals and an activity log with undo.

Deployment, Security and Operations

Building CI/CD maturity for report development by Eugene Meidinger · 1 min read Eugene Meidinger argues CI/CD isn't just for professional developers and lays out an incremental path for Power BI report teams: make changes smaller with PBIP, TMDL and basic Git, separate dev, test and prod environments with different levels of enforcement, then add automated tests and quality checks. He also notes that these practices help contain messes made by AI agents.
How I Architected a Complete Reporting Solution on Fabric F2 by Gilbert Quevauvilliers · 1 min read The author details building a comprehensive reporting solution using one Fabric F2 capacity, Power BI Embedded from Entelexos, and two core subscriptions totaling $362 per month.
Power BI Comments, Subscriptions and Alerts Explained 🔥 | Power BI Service Series Module 8 by Pankaj Namekar Module 8 of a Power BI Service series covers three collaboration and monitoring features: comments (including tagging teammates, and how they differ on dashboards vs reports), scheduled email subscriptions for yourself and others, and data alerts on dashboard tiles that fire when a KPI crosses a threshold, with common setup mistakes to avoid.
Power BI & Fabric: Automated Deployment with Azure DevOps and PowerShell by Philipp Lenz · 1 min read The PowerShell script automates Fabric deployments between consecutive stages in Azure DevOps, requiring only the source stage number while automatically determining the target stage ID.

General

Power BI October 2026 Feature Summary by Katie Murray · 6 min read Power BI's October 2026 update adds Copilot for report creation with custom visuals, a new Gantt chart visual, and a list slicer with dropdown mode.
FabCon Barcelona 2026: 4 Biggest Updates for Power BI Users by Fernan Espejo A recap of four FabCon Barcelona 2026 announcements most relevant to Power BI users: Fabric Apps for Pro, the Fabric IQ MCP Server, Dataflows Gen2 improvements, and the new F0 capacity.
Episode 316 by The Knee-Deep in Tech team · 1 min read In Episode 316, Alexander examines report evolution and asks if Power BI is fading, speaking with experts Valerie Junk and Benito van Breugel at FabCon in Barcelona.
Análisis de Estados Financieros con Power BI: Guía Completa | RETRANSMISIÓN [Spanish] by Guillermo Perdomo Sosa This comprehensive Power BI guide shows how to turn a financial statement into an interactive dashboard with horizontal and vertical analysis, DAX ratios, and data cleaning using Power Query.
Dashboard de Metas de Venta con Power BI (parte 1) | RETRANSMISIÓN [Spanish] by Guillermo Perdomo Sosa This Power BI tutorial series walks viewers through building a sales goal dashboard from scratch, covering data connection, transformations, DAX measures, and initial visualizations.
Dashboard de Metas de Venta con Power BI (parte 2) | RETRANSMISIÓN [Spanish] by Guillermo Perdomo Sosa The second part of the Power BI sales dashboard tutorial covers a complete calendar table, advanced filters, slicers for segmentation, conditional formatting on key indicators, and final report design tweaks.
From D365 Business Central to Power BI: Transform Your Sales Data into Insights by Soheil Bakhshi · 1 min read Soheil Bakhshi writes for Power BI developers who have been asked to build reports on Dynamics 365 Business Central sales data, covering how to get that data into Power BI and turn it into sales insights.