Power BI – May 2025

Maarten François
R&D Lead

Power BI – May 2025

Version Updates

For the month of May, we have another packed update for Power BI. There are a lot of new features for AI and Reporting.

AI

1. Standalone Copilot for Power BI

Previously you could only use the Copilot pane to ask questions about the report you have open. With the new standalone Copilot you can ask questions on any of the data you have access to (Based on your permissions and RLS).

You can use the new Copilot pane to:

  • Search: Find Reports, semantics models, apps,… you have access to. This is kind of like a Bing search but for items within Power BI.
  • Ask Data Questions: It can answer questions or create visuals based on measures and data fields in your model. (It can also create DAX calculations) OR just have Copilot find the relevant data for your question.
  • Ask for Summaries: Get a summary for a report or a specific topic within a report.
  • Use Fabric agents to get answers to your questions.

2. Improvements to Copilot to understand language use in questions.

The improvement is mainly related to date questions:

  • Relative dates by month (eg: last 3 months)
  • Partial dates (eg: ask for March without including year)
  • Relative dates by day of the week (eg: last Tuesday)

3. Prep data for AI (PREVIEW)

To get your data ready to be used with AI, for example the Standalone Copilot I mentioned earlier, your data needs to be cleaned and structured. With the new Prep data for AI ribbon you will have access to:

  • AI Data Schema: A subset of you model’s schema that Copilot can use in its responses. If you narrow down the relevant fields, Copilot could provide more precise results.
  • Verified Answers: See this as a FAQ. You can set up specific visuals to be answers to specific trigger phrases, keywords or full questions. This can also included filtered visuals.
  • AI Instructions: Adds extra details, logic that would help Copilot with its responses.

To test the components of your Prep Data for AI. A new picker is available in Copilot to select any/none/all of the three options:

Reporting

1. Translytical Task Flows (PREVIEW)

Report buttons can be used to run Fabric User Data Functions. Eg: Automate report actions, data write back, adding annotations, trigger workflows (in other systems than Power BI).

2. Persisted sorting for field parameters (PREVIEW)

When a field was changed in a field parameter, the sorting of a visual would be reset. With this change, this is now fixed.

3. Improvements to visual calculations (PREVIEW)

Continuing the visual calculation updates. This time, 2 new functions will be added:

  • LOOKUP: calculate a measure based on the lookup (filtering) provided. EG: LOOKUP( SUM([Sales]), [Product], “Apple”) provides the sales for Apples.
  • LOOKUPWITHTOTALS: does the same as LOOKUP but does not take into account any levels/categories displayed in your visual. Eg: If there is an extra category and we use the same formula as used for LOOKUP. It will not take into account those categories and only display total. If the category Pies has a value of 10 for Apple and the category Fruit has a value of 100, LOOKUP would display 10 and 100 while LOOKUPWITHTOTALS would show 110.

4. List Slicer updates (PREVIEW)

  • The possibility to restrict the selection in the slicer to the lowest (leaf) level of a hierarchy.
  • Labels/subtitles/metrics can be added to each value within the slicer. These would be show as a second row in the value.
  • Images can be added to your slicer values.
  • Ability to format each level in your slicer hierarchy. (Selection State, Expansion State and Interaction State)

5. Paste for List and Button Slicers (PREVIEW)

You can now paste values into the List and Button slicers through ‘Paste’ or CTRL+V. Do note the values pasted should follow the same order as the data in the slicers.

6. Customize line segment colors in Line Charts

Individual segments within your line charts can now be customized (EG: you can color the month January 2024 Green and the month April 2023 red). Do note, this is not yet conditional formatting but lays the ground work to potentially have this available in a future release.

Modelling

1. Improvements to Calculation Groups

Selection Expressions are now out of PREVIEW and can be used to have a more fine tuned control over how calculation react to certain conditions.

  • multipleOrEmptySelectionExpression: an expression that should be applied when multiple calculation items are selected OR a non existing calculation item is selected OR a conflicting selection has been made.
  • noSelectionExpression: the expression used when no filtering is done to the Calculation Group.

2. TMDL View updates

  • Context tooltips on mouse hover for each object or property
  • Format your TMDL code
  • Automatic ‘Quick Fix’ suggestions (eg: correcting misspelling of functions or property names)
  • Rename your columns directly from TMDL without changing the Power Query expression.

Future Updates

Power BI announced a new Fabric Roadmap tool. No more searching multiple (Fabric, Power BI, …) documentation to find bits and pieces of potentially planned new features. Now there’s a dedicated Roadmap page available:

https://roadmap.fabric.microsoft.com/?product=powerbi

 

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