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Category: Power BI

Prevent Future Date Spillage in Power BI Visuals

Published 2026-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth 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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Creating a Power BI Semantic Model Online

Published 2026-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers doesn’t need Power BI Desktop:

It has been in the service for quite a while so I thought I would blog about it in terms of how you can create a power BI semantic model simply using the web interface. This means you no longer need Power BI desktop, or a Windows PC to get going.

This is quite a significant change because at times you need a lot of resources on your Windows PC or you’re working on a Mac and could not do this previously.

So, I will give an overview below on how you can create the semantic model just by using your browser.

Click through to see how.

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A Sparkline-Enabled KPI Card for Power BI

Published 2026-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska shares a Power BI custom visual:

Sometimes you start experimenting with something small… and suddenly a whole little universe appears.

This happened while I was playing with the idea of a custom KPI card visual in Power BI.

I absolutely love KPI cards, but I’ve never shipped a custom SVG KPI to clients before. Once you do that, they can get a bit… stuck with it.

So I decided to explore a different path.

Following the fantastic tutorial by Phil Seamark, I built my first custom visual!

Click through for the results.

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Finding Power BI Measures without Column Relationships

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Zoe Douglas gives a visual cue that not all is well:

Have you ever put a measure on a visual with a column from a table and found it repeated the same value for every row and the total? This indicates there is no relationship for that measure and the column. And that simply may be the case, as in, there is no relationship to create. Let’s look at how we can account for that in a different way, by showing a placeholder value such as ###.

Read on to see how.

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Certificate Validation in Power BI Report Server

Published 2026-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri notes a change:

When trying to connect to a SQL database within Power BI Desktop January 2026 met with certificate chain trust error when trying to connect to the SQL Database using database DNS. Below is the error:

Microsoft SQL: A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 0 – The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.)”

The workaround for this is a bit weird, but Deepthi provides a solid explanation.

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UDFs to Support the Like-for-Like Pattern in DAX

Published 2026-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari support a pattern:

DAX user-defined functions (UDFs) are a powerful tool for improving the quality of your semantic models. DAX authors with an IT background are accustomed to creating generic code using functions. However, many DAX creators came from different backgrounds of expertise, such as statistics, business, and marketing. They may not recognize the immense power that functions have brought to the Power BI community.

In this article, we want to practically show, through an example, how to wisely use functions to improve the generalization of code and to reduce the complexity of your semantic models, with the goal of raising curiosity towards user-defined functions and – in general – the world of code development.

Read on for an example, as well as a link to the like-for-like pattern and what it means.

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Evaluating Power Query Programmatically in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mihir Wagle announces a new preview capability:

Power Query has long been at the center of data preparation across Microsoft products—from Excel and Power BI to Dataflows and Fabric. We’re introducing a major evolution: the ability to execute Power Query programmatically through a public API.

This capability turns Power Query into a programmable data transformation engine that can be invoked on demand through a REST API from notebooks, pipelines, and applications. Whether you’re orchestrating data pipelines, building custom data apps, or integrating Power Query into larger workflows, this API unlocks new flexibility and automation.

Click through for an overview of what’s available.

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Excessive Crash Dumps in Power BI Report Server January 2026

Published 2026-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri troubleshoots an issue:

I first updated the lower environments and then prod, but since most of the reports were used only in production, I didn’t see the issue coming. So, the issue with this release was that crash dump files were generated in the logfiles (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Report Server\PBIRS\LogFiles).

It’s bad enough that we who need to use Power BI Report Server are always at the end of the line when it comes to functionality, but this is adding insult to injury.

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Building Power BI Reports from the Desktop or Fabric

Published 2026-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra clears up some confusion:

If you’re a Power BI report author who’s just getting into Microsoft Fabric, you’ve probably asked the same question I hear over and over: am I supposed to stop using Power BI Desktop now?

It’s a fair question. Power BI Desktop is a Windows app that has traditionally been the place where report authors do everything: get data, transform it, model it, and build the report. Microsoft even describes that “connect, shape/transform, then load” experience as part of how Power BI Desktop works with Power Query.

Fabric changes the feel of that workflow because Power BI is now also a first-class experience in the browser inside the Fabric portal. And that browser experience isn’t just “view and share” anymore. You can edit semantic models in the service, including using Power Query for import models and building reports directly from that same environment.

Read on to see, for a brand new report, which of the two models can make the most sense.

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