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Category: Power BI

Using Sankey Diagrams in Power BI

Published 2025-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson creates a visual:

Ever wished you could see exactly how customers move through your sales funnel, or how costs flow across your business?

A Sankey Diagram makes those flows visible, showing not just totals but how values split and connect between categories.

In Power BI, the Sankey Diagram is available as a custom visual from AppSource, designed to reveal relationships and flow patterns.

There are specific times and places for Sankey charts. It requires having a natural flow in your data—that is, you need different states of data, those states should typically only “move” in one direction, you have paths to get from one state to another, and there is enough variety in pathing that not all of the data is going to the same location. The more of these rules you violate, the less useful a Sankey diagram is.

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Adding Carousel Buttons in Power BI

Published 2025-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson builds a carousel:

If you’ve ever tried to cram too many charts onto one report page, you know what happens.

The page gets cluttered, users don’t know where to look, and the story you’re trying to tell gets lost.

Carousel buttons fix that problem.

Instead of stacking visuals side by side:

You place them in the same spot and let people flip through them like slides.

It feels cleaner, takes up less space, and keeps the audience focused.

Click through to see how it works. Note that carousels can be quite useful, but they also go against one of the tenets of dashboard design: glanceability. If I need to click, drag, scroll, or otherwise manipulate the dashboard before I can see the information I need to act, it’s not glanceable—I cannot gather relevant information at a glance and act upon it.

In other words, if I’m giving somebody an interactive Power BI report with the intent that the person will dig into results, then a carousel can be quite reasonable. But if I’m creating a dashboard that should be up most of the time and available for people to see, carousels aren’t a great call.

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Finding Power BI Operations from the Capacity Metrics App

Published 2025-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb notes something that has come out recently:

It’s the week of Fabcon Europe and you’re about to be overwhelmed with new Fabric feature announcements. However there is a new blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feature that appeared in the latest version of the Fabric Capacity Metrics App (released on 11th September 2025, version 47) that won’t get any fanfare but which I think is incredibly useful – it allows you to link the Power BI operations (such as queries or refreshes) you see in the Capacity Metrics App back to Workspace Monitoring, Log Analytics or Profiler so you can get details such as the query text.

Click through to see how it works.

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Modifying Power BI Page Visibility and Active Status via Semantic Link Labs

Published 2025-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria hides (or shows) a page:

Setting page visibility and the active page are often overlooked last steps when publishing a Power BI report. It’s easy to forget the active page since it’s just set to whatever page was open when you last saved the report. But we don’t have to settle for manually checking these things before we deploy to a new workspace (e.g., from dev to prod). If our report is in PBIR format, we can run Fabric notebooks to do this for us.

Click through for a notebook and an explanation.

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Comparing Write-Back Options for Power BI

Published 2025-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge compares two options:

We’ve previously on this blog covered Power Apps write-back for Power BI/Fabric comprehensively, and in the past months we’ve taken a stab at the Fabric Native solution: Translytical Task Flows.

However, when comparing the different options, which solution actually comes out on top?

Read on as Jon contrasts the two options and explains when you might want to use each.

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No More Default Semantic Models in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven has good news for us:

Another quick post, because today is an important day for everyone working with Fabric and Power BI!

Last month, Microsoft announced they are Sunsetting Default Semantic Models: Yaay! 
Today marks that day: No more automatic child semantic models!

The idea of having a default semantic model seemed like a good one, but the problem was that too many environments had very specific needs that a default semantic model couldn’t anticipate or address. As a result, these tended to confuse end users more than save them time.

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The Consequences of Hitting Semantic Model Guardrails

Published 2025-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb smashes into a wall:

Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows you to build semantic models on very large volumes of data, but because it is still an in-memory database engine there are limits on how much data it can work with. As a result it has rules – called guardrails – that it uses to check whether you are trying to build a semantic model that is too large. But what happens when you hit those guardrails? This week one of my colleagues, Gaurav Agarwal, showed me the results of some tests that he did which I thought I would share here.

Click through to see what happens when you go past one of those guardrails.

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Enabling Map Visuals in Power BI

Published 2025-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu gets past the X:

Have you ever tried to create a map in Power BI only to see an error instead of your visualization? If your Power BI maps are not working, you’re not alone. By default, some map and filled map visuals may be disabled due to security settings. The good news? With a few quick adjustments, you can enable maps in Power BI Desktop or, if needed, in your organization’s tenant settings.

Read on to see why this visual might be disabled and how to enable it.

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Worst-Case Testing for Direct Lake Semantic Models

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb updates a prior post:

Two years ago I wrote a detailed post on how to do performance testing for Direct Lake semantic models. In that post I talked about how important it is to run worst-case scenario tests to see how your model performs when there is no model data present in memory, and how it was possible to clear all the data held in memory by doing a full refresh of the semantic model. Recently, however, a long-awaited performance improvement for Direct Lake has been released which means a full semantic model refresh may no longer page all data out of memory – which is great, but which also makes running performance tests a bit more complicated.

Read on to learn more about the improvement as well as how you can still perform your performance testing.

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Passing Selections from Visuals to Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge sends along some data:

A common misconception about Translytical Task Flows is that the only way for you to parameterize and pass user inputs to the User Data Function, is through Slicers in Power BI.

That is not true at all.

In fact, one of the most powerful ways of integrating Task Flows into your Power BI reports, is by allowing user selections made in visualisations in your report, flow through to your task flow.

Read on to see how you can do this.

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