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Category: Power BI

Administering Power BI at Scale

Published 2026-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Heidi Hasting shares some notes:

PPCC26 has wrapped up and I am still buzzing. A huge thank you to everyone who came along to Power BI Administration at Scale: Governance Patterns for Enterprise Deployments with Shabnam Watson and me. I promised I would share the demo code, so here it is.

In this post, I’m going to cover:

  • A quick recap of the session
  • How this builds on my earlier tenant settings post
  • What the demo does and how it works
  • Where to download the notebook and the full kit

Click through for that recap as well as some extra details and tools.

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Where the Business Logic Lives in Power BI

Published 2026-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev answers a question:

A current engagement calls for migrating a rather elaborate financial dashboard from Qlik to Power BI. Just when we think there is light at the end of the tunnel, another business rule is unearthed in Qlik that we need to convert. These rules range from business calculations and dummy rows in dimension tables to allocation overrides.

This brings us to an important question: Where should all this business logic live?

Click through for Teo’s answer to this question.

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Power BI for Nonprofits

Published 2026-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Stephanie Bruno breaks out the green visor:

Your nonprofit is ready to escape spreadsheet chaos and move into Power BI. Then you open the licensing page. Pro? Premium Per User? Fabric capacity? F2, F64, F-what?! If you’re a nonprofit trying to make every dollar count, figuring out what to buy can feel like reading a spellbook in a language you don’t speak. We get this question a lot, so here’s our plain-language guide.

Prices below are in USD and current as of October 2026. Microsoft changes licensing pretty often, so always double-check the official nonprofit offers page before you buy.

Read on for several tips on how to get the most out of Power BI if you do work for a non-profit organization.

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Using a Continuous Axis for Date Tables in Power BI

Published 2026-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari gussy up a visual:

In a previous article, Creating a simpler and chart-friendly Date table in Power BI, we showed you how to create a Date table you can use in a line chart with a continuous X-axis instead of a categorical one, even when the granularity is the month rather than the day. That technique stores every level as a DateTime column and relies on custom format strings to display the month name.

The auto date/time feature in Power BI provides the same user experience using a different technique. Its hidden date table uses text columns for quarters and months, sorted by a numeric column. However, the line chart still offers a continuous X-axis when you drill down to the month level. We keep saying that auto date/time is not a best practice, but this behavior is useful. Can we obtain it with our own Date table? Yes, we can.

If you have a Date table in your model (as you should!), this article explains how to enable the continuous X-axis in your report when the user groups dates by year, quarter, month, or week.

Click through to see how it looks, as well as how it works.

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Full-Text Indexing and Power BI Semantic Model Refresh Times

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb runs a test:

The September release of Power BI saw the introduction of a powerful new feature: full text indexing, which makes searching and filtering on text columns much faster and enables the use of the new TextContains() and TextSimilarity() DAX functions. You need to enable it on a per-column basis and when you do that you have the option to rebuild the full-text index for those columns when you do a Full refresh or when you do a refresh of the type Indexes. So the big question is: how long does it take to build a full-text index on a column and what impact will it have on your overall refresh times?

Read on for that answer in a reasonably-sized dataset containing street addresses.

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Working with the Power BI Gantt Chart

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk tries out a new built-in visual:

Almost every company runs projects or has some kind of timeline, and most of the time that planning is tracked somewhere else, for example, in an Excel file or in another tool. But at the same time, most of our data is already in Power BI. Until now you basically had two options:

  • A custom visual which might need a paid license.
  • A workaround you build yourself, like a stacked bar chart or a matrix with conditional formatting, which works, but every change means fixing your own workaround.

It looks fairly reasonable, though I do hope the Power BI team is able to relax some of those restrictions before it goes GA. Because I’m only so much of a masochist, I didn’t look up whether Power BI Report Server will include this visual. Maybe it will three years from now.

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The Value of Apache Ossie

Published 2026-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Victoria Holt shares some information:

Apache Ossie (incubating) is an industry-wide specification effort to standardize how we exchange semantic metadata across analytics, AI and BI platforms, providing a vendor neutral, single source of truth for semantic data. Ossie was previously known as Open Semantic Interchange (OSI). A semantic model is simply a shared definition of business concepts, metrics and relationships that helps people, reports and AI systems interpret data consistently.

Click through to learn more about Ossie’s intent. There’s still a long way to go, but with all(?) of the major players on board, hopefully we’ll get some good outcomes.

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Power Query Linting for Code Coverage

Published 2026-10-08 by Kevin Feasel

John Kerski has an update to pql-test:

Several years ago, I wrote a blog article introducing the concept of code coverage for semantic models: Part 8: Bringing DataOps to Power BI. With the state of Power BI technology at the time, the bridge was a little far and implementation was quite arduous.

That has changed. With Power BI Project files and User-Defined Functions becoming generally available in 2026, we now have detailed inspection possibilities with what tests exist, what specifically is being tested, and where the gaps in testing live.

I’m happy to announce that version 0.1.18 of pql-test introduces our first attempt at code coverage for semantic models: pql-test code-coverage.

Click through to see what’s new, as well as links to pql-test and more.

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Power BI Projects Now GA

Published 2026-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

John Kerski takes note:

Do you know where you were on June 15, 2023? Do not fret, neither do I. But I do remember a blog post written by Rui Romano announcing the preview of the Power BI Project (PBIP) format back then.

Many in the Power BI world rejoiced at this news. Microsoft was finally taking steps toward better practices seen in software development and applying them to the analytics space.

As it happens, June 15, 2023 was just the first step. Since then, PBIP has evolved into the format we have today and I am happy to see that, as of September 2026, PBIP is generally available as a fully-supported feature for Power BI by Microsoft.

Before I explain the mechanics of PBIP, let me outline the real problems it was designed to solve.

Not included in John’s article: “Power BI Report Server.” Because Power BI Report Server users learn early on not to attempt to rise above their station.

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Building Business versus Data Apps in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi builds an app:

While building that application, I came across a few gotchas and limitations around its architecture. But there is also another Fabric Apps pattern that takes a quite different approach. Instead of creating an operational database, it uses the relationships, measures and business logic we already have in a Power BI semantic model.

Microsoft calls this the Data App template. In this article, I compare it with the operational pattern from my previous exercise, which I refer to as a Business App. They both run on Fabric Apps, but what happens underneath is different. Their security requirements, sharing model and licensing are different too. So, let’s go through what I tested, what caught me out, and where I think each pattern makes sense.

Read on to learn more.

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