What Are the Latest Updates in Power BI?

Trying to keep up with Power BI’s constant stream of updates can feel like a full-time job. This article breaks down the most important new features recently added to both Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service, focusing on the ones that will actually make a difference in your day-to-day work.

Reporting & Visualization Gets a Big Upgrade

The core of Power BI is building clear, interactive reports. Fortunately, many of the latest updates are focused on making this process faster, more intuitive, and more powerful.

On-Object Interaction is Now the Standard

If you’ve used Power BI recently, you've noticed the move towards “On-Object Interaction.” This feature, which places formatting and editing options directly on the visuals you’re working with, is now the default experience. The goal is to reduce the amount of time you spend moving your mouse back and forth to the various panes on the right side of the screen.

Instead of hunting through the Visualizations pane, you can now:

• Add data fields directly to a chart by clicking buttons right on the visual.

• Format titles, labels, and colors through a contextual menu that appears when you select an element.

• Switch visual types with a single click from the on-object menu.

It takes a little getting used to if you’re accustomed to the old way, but it significantly streamlines the report design workflow once you get the hang of it.

The New Card Visual Gets Smarter with Reference Labels

The standard card visual that simply displays a single large number is a dashboard staple. The new and improved card visual takes this a step further, allowing you to add more context without cluttering your page. The big new addition here is Reference Labels.

Reference labels let you add supplementary metrics to your card visuals. For example, instead of just showing total sales this month, your card could also show:

• Sales from the same period last year.

• The percentage change from the previous month.

• Your sales target or goal.

This allows you to create rich, KPI-style visuals that tell a more complete story at a glance, all within a single visual container. To use it, simply add extra data fields to the "Reference labels" area in the visual's data settings.

Visual Calculations: A New Way to Do DAX

This one is a big deal for anyone who writes DAX formulas. Traditionally, calculations in Power BI were done at the data model level, creating new measures or calculated columns. Visual Calculations allow you to create calculations that exist only on a specific visual.

Why does this matter? It vastly simplifies the process for common calculations like:

• Running Totals: Easily create a sum that accumulates across categories in a chart.

• Moving Averages: Smooth out line charts to better see trends over time.

• Percent of Parent: Quickly calculate what percentage each sub-category contributes to its parent category.

In the past, these required complex DAX formulas. Now, you can enter a "visual calculations" mode and write much simpler formulas that directly reference the data already on the visual. For example, to get a running total, you could use a simple function like RUNNINGSUM([Sales Amount]) instead of a convoluted DAX expression. It makes DAX much more approachable for intermediate users.

Data Modeling and DAX Enhancements

For those who spend more time in the data model view, Microsoft has rolled out several quality-of-life improvements.

More Flexibility in the Model View

Working with complex data models with dozens of tables just got a little easier. You can now resize the “Properties” and “Data” panes on the right, or collapse them completely, giving you more canvas space to organize your table relationships.

Additionally, defining relationships between DirectQuery data sources from the same source (for example, two different SQL Server databases) is now generally available, making it easier to create unified models on top of disparate systems without importing all the data.

New DAX Functions to Streamline Formulas

If you're a DAX power user, you'll be happy to know new functions are always being added. A couple of recent highlights include:

• MATCHBY: This function is an optional argument in windowing functions like OFFSET and INDEX. It allows you to match rows based on columns other than the primary partitioning and ordering columns. It provides a more powerful and intuitive way to perform comparisons within a dataset.

• Enhancements to ORDERBY: The ORDERBY function now supports more complex ordering criteria, giving you finer control over how your tables and calculations are sorted.

These may seem like minor additions, but for those who build complex calculations, they solve specific, time-consuming problems.

Power BI Service & Governance

A lot of powerful new developments center on how you share, manage, and govern your reports in the cloud-based Power BI Service, especially with its deeper integration into Microsoft Fabric.

Power BI Home is Redesigned for Fabric

The new Power BI Home inside Microsoft Fabric is designed to be your central hub for all data-related activities, not just Power BI reports. The layout has been updated to feel much more like an Office 365 application. It provides a familiar navigation on the left, an easy-to-use creation hub, and better organization for recommended and recent files.

The goal is to provide a single, unified experience where you can seamlessly move between creating a report in Power BI, working with data pipelines in Data Factory, or querying data with T-SQL - all within the same interface.

Git Integration for Developers and Data Teams

Here's a major step forward for data teams that want to apply software development best practices to their BI work. You can now natively sync a Power BI workspace with an Azure DevOps Git repository.

This allows teams to:

• Version Control Reports: Track every change made to a report or dataset and revert to previous versions if something breaks.

• Collaborate in Parallel: Developers can work on new features in separate branches of the repository before merging changes back into the main version.

• Automate Deployments: Use DevOps pipelines to automatically publish changes from a development workspace to a testing and production workspace, creating a more robust CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) process.

How to Get the Latest Updates

Keeping Power BI Desktop updated is the best way to ensure you have access to all these new features. While you can download the latest version from the Power BI website, the easiest method is to install it from the Microsoft Store on Windows.

Why the Microsoft Store? Because it will automatically push updates to you in the background. You won't have to remember to check for and download a new version every month. Just open the Microsoft Store, search for Power BI Desktop, install it, and you're good to go.

Final Thoughts

Power BI continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, blending powerful new features for enterprise data teams with useful quality-of-life updates for everyday report builders. Staying informed about these changes helps you work more efficiently and create more impactful reports for your organization.

Of course, this constant evolution highlights the complexity and steep learning curve required to master traditional BI tools. We built Graphed for teams who want powerful insights without the need for intensive training. It lets you connect all your marketing and sales data in one place and build dashboards simply by asking for what you want in plain English, turning hours of report building into a 30-second conversation.