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Category: Power BI

Working with Headers in Paginated Reports

Published 2026-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword just wnats things to line up correctly:

If you’ve tried to get header rows to repeat or scroll as you move through your paginated reports, you may have felt the frustration of getting them working correctly. Whether it’s Reporting Services, Power BI, or Fabric, the flavour doesn’t matter.

The properties on the tablix should provide the functionality, but they’re not reliable. In this post we’ll look at how to achieve the repetition and scrolling behaviour that will work consistently.

Read on to re-experience one of the more annoying pain points around SQL Server Reporting Services and now Power BI paginated reports.

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Showing Transaction Details on Power BI Matrices

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari want more detail:

A common challenge in Power BI reporting is how to display several pieces of information about a single item (such as sales transactions, product details, or customer details) without dedicating a separate column to each attribute. Using individual columns for each detail can consume space, especially for fields that are often empty. This article explores techniques to consolidate multiple fields from a business entity or transaction into a single column in a matrix visual, thus presenting transaction details in a space-efficient way.

They walk through several iterations of the process. The real challenge with displaying those details is that your end users need to understand what’s in the details, as there’s no good way to describe what the information means. But when your users do understand what can be in there, I could see this being quite helpful.

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Solid Black Icons in Power BI Desktop January 2026

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo clues us in on a bug:

In mid-January 2026, many Power BI Desktop users began noticing a strange visual regression: several icons in the interface—including the Data, Model, and DAX icons—appeared as solid black shapes instead of their normal outlines. The issue appeared suddenly, even on machines where Power BI Desktop had not been updated. Because it happened the same week that Power BI Desktop January 2026 was released, this led to understandable confusion.

The root cause was not Power BI Desktop itself but an unexpected regression in the WebView2 runtime, one of the external dependencies used to render parts of the UI. Microsoft confirmed the issue and is preparing an official fix.

Marco does have a temporary fix that works until Microsoft has the official fix in place.

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Measuring Time to Display an Image in Power BI

Published 2026-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb breaks out the stopwatch:

Carrying on my series on troubleshooting Power BI performance problems with Performance Analyzer, another situation where a report may be slow even when the DAX queries it generates against the underlying semantic model are fast is when you have large images displayed in an Image visual. Let’s see an example.

Click through for that example. And maybe don’t plop in so many 25 MB images.

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Defining Applications in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword deploys an app:

When using Power BI or Fabric workspaces to browse reports, we’re greeted with a list of items and their attributes. While attention is given to report visuals such as bars, pies, candles, and RAG highlights, the surrounding experience is neglected. When it comes to consumption, the standard interface falls short.

Apps fill this gap. They’ve been around in Power BI for a while, but with the additional layers that come with Fabric, the need for a clean way to present content is increasingly valuable.

Read on to learn about more functionality around apps and how you can set them up in Fabric/Power BI.

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Changing Power BI Dashboard Themes by Toggle

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk demonstrates a process:

In this tutorial, I will recreate a project I built last year: a mini Power BI dashboard with a toggle button to change its appearance. When you toggle the button, the background color changes, the logo and snow switch images are updated, and the visuals are restyled accordingly (including the color of the trees). 

This project combines different tutorials I created in the past, which cover dynamic color changes and the lollipop visual.
At the bottom of this page, you will find a step-by-step video, and you can download the file from the download page.

Click through for instructions, the video, and a zip file to work from.

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Performance Analysis of Geocoding in Power BI

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb grabs the map and pushpins:

When a user complains about their Power BI report being slow it’s normal for the developer to open up DAX Studio and start tuning the measures in the semantic model because 95% of the time the problem is the DAX. But there’s a whole class of report performance problems that are nothing to do with the semantic model or DAX and they are the ones that are much easier to troubleshoot now that Performance Analyzer is available in the browser as well as Desktop. Today I want to look at one of them: geocoding in map visuals.

Click through for a demonstration and a few tips to help limit the pain of geocoding large amounts of data.

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Diagnosing DirectQuery Performance Woes

Published 2026-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb digs into one type of DirectQuery performance slowdown:

One very common cause of Power BI performance problems is having a table with a large number of rows on your report. It’s a problem I wrote about here, and while I used an Import mode for my example in that post I also mentioned that this can be an even bigger problem in DirectQuery mode: while the DAX query for the table visual might have a TOPN filter that asks for 502 rows, the query going back to the DirectQuery data source (usually a SQL query) may not have that filter applied and could return a much larger number of rows, which could then take a long time for Power BI to read. I wrote about this in more detail here and showed how you can diagnose the problem in Performance Analyzer by looking at the Execute DirectQuery event and ActualQueryDuration, RowsRead and DataReadDuration metrics. But now I have a custom visual to display Performance Analyzer export data, what does this look like? Also, what can Execution Metrics tell us?

Read on to learn more.

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Implementing Tooltips on Dynamic Measures

Published 2026-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shows some information:

Happy New Year with oldies but goodies…especially given that this technique might be hard to find elsewhere! How do you implement a tooltip page that shows only the measure the end user hovers over? Consider this matrix with three measures on columns grouped by product categories on rows. The user wants to see a trend chart for the measure they hover over.

I’m trying to remember if this is possible in Power BI Report Server. I don’t want to slander the product unnecessarily (my necessary slander should be good enough, thank you), so I won’t hazard a guess.

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