MSBI Tutor

Time-based analysis is at the heart of business intelligence. Whether you’re comparing sales from two years ago, analyzing last month’s performance, or calculating totals for the current quarter, time intelligence is essential. While Power BI has long supported time-based calculations,  existing functions  come with limitations: No built-in support for week-based calculations. Requirement for a continuous date table. Limited flexibility for non-Gregorian calendars (e.g., fiscal, lunar, retail). Introducing  calendar-based time intelligence —a powerful and flexible way to work with any calendar structure in Power BI.   What Are Calendars? In Power BI, calendars define which columns in a table represent specific time attributes, enabling customized time-based analysis. You can define multiple calendars on any table, giving you full control over how time is segmented and analyzed.   Key Benefits Works with any calendar: Gregorian, shifted Gregorian, retail (44...

Mac users, rejoice — semantic model editing in the Power BI service is now generally available, bringing core modeling capabilities to the web. Create New Semantic Models in the Web You can now create new import semantic models from over 100 connectors, all within your browser. Getting started: 1. Navigate to the Create page and select Get data. This will launch the  modern Power Query Get Data experience  for you to discover and connect to data including sources like Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server, and more! 2. Choose your data source and configure connection settings. 3. Select the tables you want included in your semantic model. From here you have the following 3 options: Option 1: Create a report This option takes you into the report editing experience in the Power BI service. Here, you can immediately start building a report on top of your newly created semantic model. The report editor provides all the familiar tools for designing visuals, adding filters, and customi...

Semantic Model Refresh Templates  in Power BI enables you to orchestrate semantic model refreshes using Fabric Data pipelines. This feature allows you to visualize and sequence refresh activities for common and advanced scenarios. You can access these templates by selecting  Create advanced refresh  from the refresh dropdown menu on the semantic model details page in your Microsoft Fabric workspace. The template gallery includes several common refresh scenarios such as event-driven refreshes, refreshing a semantic model after a dataflow runs, scheduled refreshes, and sequencing multiple semantic model refreshes. When you select a template, you can start a guided tour that walks you through the steps to set up a semantic model refresh.   The template gallery can be reopened from the pipeline ribbon in the  Home  tab by selecting the  Use a template  button. Let’s dive in and see several examples for the ...

This week, we’re excited to announce the availability of two new Copilot experiences in Power BI. The Chat with your Data experience, which was  announced at Build 2025 , has now been fully deployed. Additionally, Copilot is now supported in securely embedded Power BI reports for portals and websites, enabling users to engage with the Copilot Report Pane directly within embedded report experiences. Chat with your data available now This dedicated, full-screen Copilot interface enables seamless content discovery and provides precise answers to your most critical business inquiries, drawing from any data you are authorized to access. Just ask your question, and Copilot will find the right data and use it craft a visual or summary to answer your question. Using the standalone Copilot experience to find a report and answer a data question The feature is off by default for now, so to take advantage of this experience, make sure to turn on the Users can access a standalone, cross-it...

Updates to org apps (Preview) – more customization, deployment pipelines, and Git – plus what’s next like new license support and audiences! We’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on org apps and clear suggestions on what we should build next to meet your organization’s data distribution and consumption needs. With your feedback, we’ve made several updates to org apps and have more in the works. Let’s get right to what’s new and then we’ll cover what’s coming next as we work towards general availability of org apps. Now available: New combined navigation setting for customizing your org apps. Git support for org app developers looking for version history. Deployment pipelines for staging and testing your org apps across workspaces. What’s next: Support for org apps in Pro workspaces. Add paginated reports to org apps, with org app-managed access propagation for semantic models. View org apps in Power BI mobile apps. Conditio...