Weekly PowerBI

What shipped

• Deep dive into Power BI reporting with the new date picker slicer option: Power BI’s new date picker slicer helps report authors set dynamic default date ranges while giving viewers flexible, easy ways to explore dates, ranges, and rolling periods as data refreshes. (16 Jul)
• Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms: We’re proud to share that Microsoft has once again been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for the nineteenth consecutive year. (10 Jul)
• Deep dive into the Shape Map in Power BI: Discover how the Shape Map visual (Generally Available) in Power BI helps you bring custom geographic boundaries, flexible map formats, and data-driven color formatting into your reports. (07 Jul)
• Deep dive into tooltip options in Power BI visuals: Discover how Power BI’s tooltip (Generally Available) options help you tailor hover experiences—from curated field lists and sentence-style insights to fully custom report page tooltips. (06 Jul)
• DAX user-defined functions: Visual calculations (Generally Available) in Power BI, making it easier to add DAX calculations directly to the visual where they’re used. (02 Jul)
• Power BI reports and Fabric Apps: Expanding how you build on your semantic model data: Power BI reports continue to help analysts build secure, governed BI experiences on semantic models, while Fabric Apps expands what developers can create from the same trusted data. (01 Jul)
• Agentic and Copilot reporting workflows: Power BI Desktop Bridge (Preview) Power BI Desktop Bridge introduces a new way of working, allowing external applications and agents to interact directly with Power BI Desktop! (30 Jun)
• Protect once, enforce everywhere: Protection policies for Power BI: How to use sensitivity labels and Protection Policies to secure your Power BI estate — and why it matters more than ever in the age of AI. (24 Jun)
• Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on for the Denodo connector in Power BI: When you configure a Denodo data connection for Entra ID SSO, users querying a semantic model in DirectQuery mode are authenticated to Denodo with their own Microsoft Entra ID identity. (23 Jun)
• Connector migration from ODBC to ADBC: If you use connectors like Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery in Power BI or Fabric, there’s an important change coming. (18 Jun)

Why it matters

• Deep dive into Power BI reporting with the new date picker slicer option: Power BI’s new date picker slicer helps report authors set dynamic default date ranges while giving viewers flexible, easy ways to explore dates, ranges, and rolling periods as data refreshes.
• Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms: We’re proud to share that Microsoft has once again been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for the nineteenth consecutive year.
• Deep dive into the Shape Map in Power BI: Discover how the Shape Map visual (Generally Available) in Power BI helps you bring custom geographic boundaries, flexible map formats, and data-driven color formatting into your reports.
• Deep dive into tooltip options in Power BI visuals: Discover how Power BI’s tooltip (Generally Available) options help you tailor hover experiences—from curated field lists and sentence-style insights to fully custom report page tooltips.
• DAX user-defined functions: Reusable DAX functions are production-ready, making complex semantic-model logic easier to standardise.
• Power BI reports and Fabric Apps: Expanding how you build on your semantic model data: Power BI reports continue to help analysts build secure, governed BI experiences on semantic models, while Fabric Apps expands what developers can create from the same trusted data.
• Agentic and Copilot reporting workflows: Microsoft is pushing more report design, semantic-model analysis and deployment tasks into AI-assisted workflows.
• Protect once, enforce everywhere: Protection policies for Power BI: How to use sensitivity labels and Protection Policies to secure your Power BI estate — and why it matters more than ever in the age of AI.
• Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on for the Denodo connector in Power BI: When you configure a Denodo data connection for Entra ID SSO, users querying a semantic model in DirectQuery mode are authenticated to Denodo with their own Microsoft Entra ID identity.
• Connector migration from ODBC to ADBC: Power BI and Fabric connectors are moving toward Arrow Database Connectivity for several major data platforms.

How analytics teams could use it

• Deep dive into Power BI reporting with the new date picker slicer option: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• Deep dive into the Shape Map in Power BI: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• Deep dive into tooltip options in Power BI visuals: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• DAX user-defined functions: Model owners can reduce repeated measure patterns and enforce shared business logic across reports.
• Power BI reports and Fabric Apps: Expanding how you build on your semantic model data: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• Agentic and Copilot reporting workflows: Analytics teams can prototype report pages, inspect models and automate authoring tasks while keeping humans in review for metric quality.
• Protect once, enforce everywhere: Protection policies for Power BI: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on for the Denodo connector in Power BI: Assess whether it improves governance, authoring speed, semantic-model quality, connector reliability or app distribution.
• Connector migration from ODBC to ADBC: BI teams should audit Databricks, Snowflake and BigQuery connection paths so driver changes do not surprise production refreshes.

Editorial read

Power BI is moving in two parallel directions: stronger governance for enterprise distribution, and more AI-assisted creation for reports and semantic models. For analytics products, the practical opportunity is to turn recurring BI assets into governed products: targeted audiences, safer data-flow controls, reusable DAX logic, and faster authoring loops.