Power BI Weekly

Issue 377

2^nd October 2026

Welcome to the 377th edition of Power BI Weekly! It was FabCon Europe in Barcelona this week, and the place to start is Mohammad Ali's Power BI's next chapter. It announces a natural-language app-building experience coming to Power BI Desktop, built on Fabric Apps with write-back (notably in preview for Pro and PPU customers, not just those on Fabric capacity). It also gives an early look at semantic views over OneLake data, and Fabric IQ is now generally available in Microsoft 365 Copilot (if that's your thing).

Alongside that, the Power BI September 2026 Feature Summary is a big one. My personal highlight is that Power BI Projects (PBIP) is now generally available, with PBIR becoming the default report format. Legacy reports get converted when you edit them, so check any scripts that parse the old format. The agentic authoring tools have gone GA too. On the modeling side, you can now create and edit DirectQuery semantic models in the service. APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT now works for Import and Direct Lake, in preview with a standard error of around 1.6%, so keep it away from your financials. The new Power Query editor is also in preview in Desktop.

Two admin items are worth flagging. Model owners can now block read-only users from querying a model through Copilot and Microsoft's MCP tools, though access stays allowed by default. And from October, Power BI Desktop versions from March 2026 or earlier can no longer save to OneDrive or SharePoint, so make sure your users have updated.

Also from the team, Christian Wade has written about Microsoft & Snowflake's commitment to Apache Ossie, a vendor-neutral standard for exchanging semantic metadata, with an open-source converter that can turn an Ossie definition into a Power BI semantic model. I think the plan to make DAX an Ossie-recognised query language is the more interesting long-term bit.

For everything on the Fabric side of FabCon, head over to Fabric Weekly. Issue #12 covered the first wave of announcements, and next week's edition will round up the rest.

Data Prep

• Improvements To Power Query Integration In Power BI Report Builder
  The latest Power BI Report Builder improves Power Query integration: the Get Data button is renamed Power Query, and a new custom property tab for Power Query datasets shows the dataset's M code, its M parameters and the ID of its cloud connection, with a button that opens Manage Connections and Gateways in the Fabric portal so you can find and edit that connection.
• Power Query 2026: todo lo que cambia con la nueva interfaz [Spanish]
  A Spanish-language walkthrough of the new Power Query editor preview in Power BI Desktop, comparing the classic data view with the new schema view and diagram view, and showing the formula bar's Script option for viewing a query's full M code.
• ChatGPT + Power BI for Data Cleaning and Transformation | Work Smarter 🔥
  This video shows how ChatGPT speeds up Power BI data cleaning and transformation by automatically creating accurate Power Query M code for problems such as messy column names, inconsistent formats, duplicates, null values, and complex logic.

Data Modeling

• Microsoft & Snowflake’s Commitment to Apache Ossie
  Microsoft affirms its commitment to Apache Ossie (incubating), a vendor-neutral standard for exchanging semantic metadata developed with Snowflake. A new open-source converter turns an Ossie document into both a Snowflake Semantic View and a Power BI semantic model, and Microsoft plans to help establish DAX as an Ossie-recognised query language and extend support to ontologies.
• Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) Reloaded
  Teo Lachev follows up on Open Semantic Interchange, now the Apache Ossie incubator project, noting that Microsoft engineers contributed a bidirectional Power BI/Fabric converter (open source, not a supported product feature). Since only tables and relationships map across, he sketches where it still helps, letting a Snowflake agent query a Power BI semantic model, plus an alternative via a Fabric data agent exposed over MCP, cautioning that either route is a custom integration.
• Prep data for AI vs. Fabric Data Agent Instructions: What Goes Where?
  The article explains that Fabric Data Agent instructions control source selection and behavior, while Prep data for AI configurations manage semantic model interpretation in Power BI, ensuring proper source choice and DAX generation for measures such as Net Sales Amount.
• Power BI MCP, Fabric MCP and Skills for Fabric in VS Code: setup and limits (Part 1 of 2)
  A practical setup guide for the Power BI and Fabric MCP servers and Microsoft's Skills for Fabric in VS Code, covering the extension route, the remote servers and all four ways to install the skills (including a trap with the ZIP download), plus an honest list of what the tools can and can't do. Checked against Skills for Fabric v0.3.18.
• Skills for Fabric in practice: tune them, write your own, close the synonyms gap (Part 2 of 2)
  Part 2 covers using Microsoft's Skills for Fabric day to day, tuning them to team standards without forking them, and writing your own, with a full walkthrough of a new skill that adds Q&A and data-agent synonyms to a Power BI semantic model: an AI-readiness setting that neither the Power BI MCP server nor the official skills will touch. Tested end to end in Power BI Desktop.
• I used a Bi-Directional Filter in Power BI... that almost got me fired
  This video demonstrates how bidirectional filters in Power BI can unintentionally affect data model filtering, showing why single-direction relationships are better and presenting safer DAX alternatives.
• Planning in Microsoft Fabric: From insight to action
  Planning in Fabric IQ gains a simpler setup that connects directly to a Power BI semantic model using the planner's own identity, a writeback experience that adds budgets and forecasts back into that model for Copilot and agents to reason over, a Rust-based Native Planning Engine in preview with up to 10x scale, event triggers that start pipelines, refreshes or notebooks after writeback, and embedding of planning sheets in org apps alongside Power BI reports.
• Power BI Calculation Groups: Precedence Explained
  Power BI’s Calculation Groups Precedence property controls which calculation runs first and how they nest, affecting filter context and resulting values, as shown in an example where changing precedence changed a calculated average from 8.42 to 24.45 without altering DAX or data.

Report Authoring and Interactivity

• I Let Claude Build My Entire Power BI Report. Here's How It Went
  Fernan Espejo uses Claude with Microsoft's skills-for-fabric to build a Power BI report from scratch, covering setup, prompting and the result, then shares his verdict on how it went.
• Leveraging Fabric Skills: Enabling an Agent to Plan My Power BI Report
  Parul Rani Sagar tests the Power BI authoring plugins from skills-for-fabric: from a one-line prompt an agent designed a multi-page report in under three minutes, but her review found broken currency format strings, a misleading margin axis, missing filters and an unfiltered filing list, which a follow-up prompt fixed. Delegate, review, refine.
• Using Fabric Apps for Inventory Management, Reordering and stock counts
  Valerie Junk shows how she used Fabric Apps, built on the same semantic model as an inventory report, to turn a static stock overview into a working tool: exporting just what's needed to Excel, reordering per supplier with notes, writing orders back to a SQL database, approving them as a team and doing stock counts on a phone.
• PBIR A11y CLI Updates
  The PBIR A11y CLI now includes an advisory tab order check, improved group-based position calculations, and enhanced alt text validation.
• Power BI Matrix Just Changed! 🤯 2 New Features You Need to See| Expand, Collapse & Freeze Options
  Amit Chandak demonstrates two matrix updates from the August 2026 release: expanding and collapsing column headers (with customisable +/- icons), and setting the default freeze state of row headers, which can differ between desktop and mobile layouts.
• Power BI Card Label Changes Automatically with Slicers — Using ISFILTERED DAX
  Learn how to make a Power BI Card label update automatically based on slicer selections using the ISFILTERED DAX function for more interactive dashboards.
• Power BI DrillDown vs DrillThrough Explained | Stop Confusing Them 🔥 | Full Tutorial
  Explains the difference between drill down (moving through a hierarchy within the same visual) and drillthrough (jumping to a separate page filtered to the selected item), with step-by-step setup of each, when to use which, and common mistakes.

Deployment, Security and Operations

• Power BI Row Level Security (RLS) Complete Guide 🔥 | Power BI Service Series Module 7
  Module 7 of a Power BI Service series covers row-level security end to end: static and dynamic RLS (USERNAME and USERPRINCIPALNAME), publishing roles and assigning users in the service, testing in Desktop and the service, shared semantic models, guest users and common misconfigurations.
• Power BI Scheduled Refresh: Automatically Update Your Reports
  Learn how to set up automatic scheduled data refreshes in Power BI Service using the Scheduled Refresh feature.
• #5 Adding users, licenses and guest access
  Part 5 of Paul Turley's Fabric getting-started series covers getting people into Fabric: where licences live, the easiest ways to assign them, and planning guest access for external users.
• #6 Fabric Tenant Settings: What to Enable, Disable, and Ignore at Launch
  Part 6 of Paul Turley's Fabric getting-started series looks at tenant settings: which to turn on, which to lock down and which can safely be left alone when first launching Fabric.

General

• Power BI’s next chapter: The evolution of business intelligence
  Mohammad Ali's FabCon Barcelona overview for Power BI: a natural-language app-building experience coming to Power BI Desktop in the next few months (built on Fabric Apps, with write-back, and in preview for Pro and PPU as well as Fabric capacity customers), an early look at semantic views defined directly over OneLake data, Microsoft's commitment to the Apache Ossie semantic-interchange standard with Snowflake, and general availability of Fabric IQ in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Cowork and of the Fabric IQ MCP server.
• Power BI September 2026 Feature Summary
  The September 2026 roundup, published for FabCon Barcelona. Highlights include general availability of Power BI Projects (PBIP), with PBIR now the default report format, and of the agentic authoring tools (Authoring MCP, Desktop Bridge, skills-for-fabric); a remote Authoring MCP server and Microsoft 365 Copilot in Power BI in preview; DirectQuery model editing in the service; APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT for Import and Direct Lake; string indexing and full-text search (preview); a new Power Query editor (preview); and a setting to block read-only users' Copilot and MCP access to a model. Note: from October, Power BI Desktop versions from March 2026 or earlier can no longer save to OneDrive or SharePoint.
• FabCon Barcelona - Feature Draft - Ep.568 - Power BI tips
  Mike Carlo and Tommy Puglia discuss the FabCon Barcelona announcements, drawing on Microsoft's FabCon keynote post, the 'Power BI's next chapter' post and the September Power BI and Fabric feature summaries.