Category: Power BI

Meagan 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.

Chris 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.

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.