A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb tells us don’t panic:
Since March 2026, Power BI semantic models have started showing warnings in their Refresh History in the Service. This has scared a few people but in fact all that is happening is that errors which were there all along and which don’t prevent refreshes from completing are now being flagged. Documentation on this feature can be found here but let’s see an example of the type of errors that can cause these warnings.
Click through for that example.
Leave a CommentBen Richardson takes you to the right place:
Most Power BI users share reports one of two ways: they send the full report URL and ask people to filter it themselves, or they build separate reports for each team and spend the next year maintaining them.
Neither approach is ideal. Which is why URL filters are a great third option!
By appending a short query string to a report URL, you can control exactly what a reader sees the moment they open the link.
All without touching the underlying report, without duplicating it, and without relying on your readers to set up their own filters correctly.
This guide covers how URL filters work, how to write the syntax correctly, and where they will save you time.
Ben does cover the limitations around URL filters as well. This sounds like its best-case scenario is when there is another application that can serve Power BI URLs.
Leave a CommentJens Vestergaard wants to know who moved his cheese:
Semantic models do not have version control. Not really. You can store
.pbipfiles in Git, and Tabular Editor gives you a.bimfile you can diff, but neither of those workflows answers the simplest question a team asks after an update cycle: what changed?I do not mean “which file was touched.” I mean: which measures were modified, which columns were added, which relationships were removed, and what exactly is different in the DAX expression that someone edited last Tuesday. That is the question I kept running into, and the one I built this notebook to answer.
Click through to learn how.
Leave a CommentRuben Van de Voorde shares some tips:
Line charts plot a metric along an ordered axis. Usually that axis is time, which is why they’re the first thing most people reach for when the X axis is a date. They show direction, speed and rhythm in a way that tables and bar charts don’t. That ordering is the key requirement: for unordered categories like regions or product types, connecting the points implies a sequence that isn’t there, and a bar chart is the clearer choice.
Power BI makes line charts easy to build: pick a date column, pick a measure, maybe split by a category, and you are done. The result is technically correct, but maybe not as clear as it could be. This article walks through the most common ways a line chart falls short and how to fix them.
There’s a lot of solid advice and good examples in here.
Leave a CommentMeagan Longoria fixes an annoyance:
There is currently no way to set a default value in a Power BI slicer visual. If you create a report with a slicer for month and choose the current month (e.g. April 2026), save the report, and then come back to the report a month later, your original selection will be enforced and the data will now show the prior month. So how do you make reports with slicers show data for the current month by default while allowing users to select other months as needed? This video shows 3 options.
Click through for the video, as well as seeing which of the three is Meagan’s preferred route.
Leave a CommentChris Webb lays out an explanation:
I’ve been working with Microsoft BI tools for 28 years now and for all that time Microsoft has been consistent in its belief that semantic models are a good thing. Fashions have changed and at different times the wider BI industry has agreed and disagreed with this belief; right now, semantic models are cool again because everyone has realised how important they are for AI. As a result, some of Microsoft’s partners and competitors (and sometimes it’s not clear which is which) have invested in building their own semantic models and/or metrics stores, some of which don’t work at all with Power BI and some of which only work with significant limitations. This naturally raises the question of whether Power BI will ever work properly with them. The answer is no, and in this blog post I’ll explain why.
Read on for Chris’s explanation.
Leave a CommentMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari point out a row:
When it comes to visuals, users may want to specific cells highlighted in order to spot important information quickly. While browsing the forums, we came across an interesting requirement that can easily be solved with a DAX measure: highlight an entire row based on the value in the last column of the visual only. In our example, we highlight Wide World Importers because it has the maximum value (71,904.98) in the last year (2026).
I’ve had a need for this several times in the past, so it’s nice to see you can do it via visual calculations.
So, let’s use this in Power BI Report Server. Oh, wait, you can’t. But if you’re not shackled to that train wreck, click through for a nice solution.
Leave a CommentGilbert Quevauvilliers works with the on-again, off-again CI/CD solution Microsoft has to offer:
In this blog post is a way set up version control for Power BI semantic models (and reports) using the PBIP (Power BI Project) format, Azure DevOps (Azure Repos), and VS Code.
This approach treats your semantic model as readable text files (JSON/TMDL), enabling proper Git diffing, branching, merging, and collaboration—something binary .pbix files don’t support well.
Click through for the process.
Leave a CommentWhile on site this week, another common problem that I see everywhere arose again.
When you need to format currency, you use the “c” format right? It’s in nearly every set of course materials I’ve ever seen. And people do it in almost every demonstration.
But so often, that’s wrong!
Read on to learn why and what you can do instead.
Comments closedKenneth Omorodion lives in the now:
For Power BI developers, one very common (and frustrating) issue is when measures spill into future dates on charts especially when working with some time intelligence DAX calculations (e.g. MTD, YTD, etc.), date dimensions that extend beyond current date, and forecast-enabled tables.
In Power BI charts (e.g. line or bar charts), apart from dates with data, measures are also evaluated for every date on the axis, regardless if there is data or not. For example, if my dates table runs to 2026 December, but my data table only have data up to today, when I create a measure that leverages MTD or YTD for example, Power BI will tend to evaluate the measure for all dates that exist in my Dates table, unless I explicitly apply a logic to prevent this behaviour. This behaviour might result in flat lines on charts, misleading trends, and confusion to intended users.
In this article, I will demonstrate some examples of approaches to prevent or manage future dates spillage in Power BI.
Click through for some tips.
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