Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

Week-over-Week Calculations in Power BI without DAX

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu wants to avoid DAX for this calculation:

Power BI visual calculations provide a simplified way to perform time-based comparisons like week-over-week (WoW) analysis without writing complex DAX. Power BI’s time intelligence functions are powerful, but they can become challenging when working with custom calendars or unique business logic. If you’ve ever struggled with calculating WoW performance, this post will show you how to streamline the process using visual calculations.

Read on to see how. Though one thing to keep in mind is that it says week-over-week, but that assumes you have data for each week. I don’t believe this solution would cleanly handle gaps in data, so that would be something you’d want to do beforehand.

Leave a Comment

Community Resources for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb highlights some community efforts:

There are a lot of really cool free, community-developed tools and resources out there for Power BI and Fabric – so many that it’s easy to miss announcements about them. In this post I thought I’d highlight a few that came out recently and which you might want to check out.

Click through for several good resources, and there are a couple of additional ones in the comments as well.

Leave a Comment

Sorting a Visual by a Field Not on the Visual

Published 2025-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic does a bit of sorting:

Recently, I was dealing with a Power BI report where the client had a very specific requirement – to sort the data in the visual based on a particular field from the semantic model. The only “issue” was that this particular field wasn’t part of the visual. So, while figuring out how this can be accomplished (because, yes, everything can be accomplished when the client needs it, hehe), I decided to write it down and share it with everyone who might find it useful.

Nikola successfully uses machine trickery to solve the problem.

Comments closed