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Category: Power BI

Creating a Power BI Date Picker without Custom Visuals

Published 2025-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu lets users pick the date:

Many users need the ability to select a single date not a range to filter their entire report. While Power BI’s default slicer shows a long list of dates or uses relative filters like “Today” or “Yesterday,” these options can be limiting.

Additionally, relying on the filter pane often isn’t ideal for dashboards meant for end users, especially when the pane is hidden or locked. An on-screen date picker provides a more intuitive and controlled experience.

Read on to see how.

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Exfiltration Opportunities in Power Query

Published 2025-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Oscar Martinez lays out the risks:

Data exfiltration is the act of moving sensitive data outside a trusted environment without authorisation. In the context of Power Query (the data transformation engine behind Excel, Power BI, dataflows, etc.), this means an insider could use a Power Query script to siphon data from secure sources (like databases) out to an external destination. Microsoft defines data exfiltration as the movement of sensitive business data outside a trusted boundary, whether intentionally or unintentionally.^1

Click through to learn more about what is possible, as well as practical tips on how to reduce this risk.

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Farewell, SSRS

Published 2025-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

SQL Server Reporting Services is done-zo:

Starting with SQL Server 2025, Microsoft is consolidating all on-premises reporting services under Power BI Report Server (PBIRS). No new versions of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) will be released. PBIRS becomes the default on-premises reporting solution for SQL Server.

You can expect more information about specific editions when SQL Server 2025 is in General Availability (GA).

This article outlines the implications of these changes for you as a customer, and addresses any questions you might have.

The article claims that Power BI Report Server is a superset of SSRS. That might actually be so, but there’s a nagging part in the back of my brain saying that there are things we can do in SSRS that we can’t in PBIRS and that this won’t be the smooth transition that the article claims. But it’s been long enough since I’ve worked on SSRS in earnest to be able to say with certainty whether it’s the case.

H/T Blake McNeill.

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Power BI Model Analysis via INFO Functions in DAX

Published 2025-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad is leading this interrogation:

There are many DAX functions for covering day-to-day business-related calculations using measures and calculated columns. However, there is also a set of functions that can be helpful to the BI team and developers in gaining insights from the Power BI model itself. The insights can include things such as the number of both-directional relationships, the dependency of the calculations, the list of columns in tables, etc. These functions are in the category of INFO functions in DAX. Let’s see what they are and how they work.

Click through for a list, as well as how you can make use of them.

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The Role of Padding in Power BI Reports

Published 2025-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska explains why padding is so important between visuals in Power BI reports:

Now that we’ve all learned to love rounded corners, let’s talk about another quiet champion of good design: padding.

You know, that tiny bit of space inside your visuals that keeps content from being awkwardly pressed right up against the border, with no room to breathe. Yeah. That.

The ideal here is to have densely informative visuals that have sufficient padding to make it easy for a viewer to move between them.

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Native Power BI Write-Back in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge comes full-circle:

Three years ago, write-back to Power BI was my gateway into the Power BI community.

Power Apps embedded into Power BI, enabling write-back to Sharepoint, Azure SQL and Fabric, and sharing those solutions with the community, have always been some of the most fun I’ve had with “work”.

However.

While Power Apps are relatively easy to build, the solution architecture quickly becomes complex. Especially when you consider governance, CI/CD and licensing, all of which balloons in size when you are forced to integrate with a new platform (Dataverse/Power Platform) to solve a seemingly small issue in a Power BI report.

Click through to see the new way to do this. It’s been a point of frustration for me that, for so long, it has been such a challenge to allow a user to annotate or augment data in Power BI.

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Controlling Selections in Calculation Groups

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari looks at calculation groups:

Calculation groups are often used to display options in a report to change the calculation of existing measures by selecting items on a slicer. However, only a single calculation item can be executed for a measure reference, which could make the semantic model harder to use when the user selects two or more items in a calculation group.

Two new calculation group properties, multipleOrEmptySelectionExpression and noSelectionExpression, provide a way to control the calculation in these conditions that, so far, ignored the presence of the calculation group, thus executing the measures without applying any transformation. This article shows how to use these features and provides guidance on using the feature in preview: despite not having a user interface to manage these new properties, the TMDL view in Power BI Desktop and external tools like Tabular Editor already allow you to create and publish a semantic model that uses these new properties.

Read on to see how these properties work.

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Sharing Power BI Reports across Tenants

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi does a bit of sharing:

In this post, we’ll focus on a practical scenario. One organisation, let’s call it Tenant A, wants to share a Power BI report with someone from another organisation, Tenant B. We’ll cover everything from verifying licenses to configuring the Fabric Admin Portal and inviting the external user. If you’re looking to follow along, this guide will give you a clear path to replicate the same setup in your environment.

Click through for the process.

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