How can this take so long to bloody fix?!

I have built multiple dashboards using Agentic BI with Claude and Codex models, but I wanted to try how free AI models perform, so using my agentic PBIP template, I made this dashboard using a free OpenRouter model (Poolside Laguna S 2.1).

Just provided with a spec file of what I want and clone the template; result in a single prompt, and most importantly 0$,

My takeaway is that in upcoming time, the majority of the grunt work in Power BI can be easily done using locally hosted models like GLM, DeepSeek, etc., Only the planning phase and complex semantic modelling could be done using heavy models like Opus,

All code-related parts of Power BI are sorted at this point; only the logical part is a challenge

So in short, anyone (basically internal colleagues) who I've added in my Power BI email subscriptions will see my name as the sender instead of "Microsoft Power BI". Not that this is a problem itself but whenever there is a colleague who has set out of office, the email subscription will trigger the automatic out of office reply to me which I didn't need to know!

Again another classic example of Microsoft's 'wonderful' idea without considering any possible shortcomings that comes with it.

I've been a BA on a lot of BI work over the years, and the reports that cause trouble later usually aren't badly built. They just lack evidence that they were tested and accepted. This is the checklist I keep coming back to. Mandatory items are marked (M).

Numbers

• (M) Headline totals reconcile to a trusted source (not another report)
• (M) Row-level spot check of 5+ records
• (M) Record counts match; blanks/missing data explained
• Historical totals unchanged after the latest change

Filters & DAX

• (M) Each slicer filters what it should and nothing else; sync behaves as agreed
• (M) Key measures match the written business definition
• (M) Time intelligence (YTD, PY, YoY %) checked
• (M) Totals/subtotals behave – the total isn't always the sum of the rows
• Blank/zero/divide-by-zero handled

Security

• (M) Every RLS role tested ("View as" in Desktop, "Test as role" in the service)
• (M) A user with no role sees no data
• (M) Workspace/app access matches the agreed audience list

Refresh & performance

• (M) Scheduled refresh succeeds in the service
• (M) Gateway/credentials aren't tied to one person's account
• (M) Pages load in an acceptable time for real users
• Someone gets notified when refresh fails

Sign-off

• (M) No open Critical/High defects
• (M) Accepted risks and go-live conditions written down
• (M) The business owner signs, not the developer

Two habits that help: use one report ID on every test, defect and sign-off so it's all traceable, and do numbers and security first – polish can wait.

What's on your list that isn't on mine? I'm especially curious how people handle RLS testing at scale.

DAX Benchmark v2 is public today.

DAXBench is the benchmark of how well LLMs write DAX. Initially launched by me, version 2 has been developed in collaboration with SQLBI and u/marco_russo.

V2 grew from 30 to 94 tasks with more challenge types: fixing and optimizing existing code, UDFs, calculated columns, and tables. And more real-world patterns: many-to-many and inactive relationships, semi-additive measures, new vs returning customers, window functions, and more.

Answers are executed, not compared as text. A measure must return the right result on detail rows, subtotals, and the grand total. All or nothing.

• Leaderboard: https://daxbench.com
• Technical breakdown on my blog: https://www.maxanatsko.com/blog/daxbench-road-to-v2
• Marco write-up: https://www.sqlbi.com/blog/marco/2026/10/27/dax-llm-benchmark-v2/

Every report I build ends up the same way: a perfectly good table surrounded by a wall of slicers, and someone still asking "can I just filter this column?"

Yes. You can. In Excel. Since roughly the dawn of time.

Power BI's built-in table still cant, so I gave up waiting and built one myself. Its called Filter Table (working name, because naming things turned out to be harder than building them).

What it does:

- A filter under every column header: searchable value lists for text, ranges for numbers, from/to for dates

- They're real report filters, so the cards and charts on the page follow along and bookmarks remember them

- Active filters show as chips above the rows, so nobody has to guess why their numbers look wierd

- Per-column aggregation, because summing percentages is a crime I've seen commited in production

- Conditional colours, grouping with subtotals, frozen columns, CSV export

It's free. It makes no network calls and your data stays in your report, so your IT team can relax. Slightly.

Theres a live demo running the actual visual in the browser, and the .pbiviz download, at https://odvisuals.com

It's heading to AppSource soon (as soon as Microsoft's enrolment form stops throwing errors at me). Before it lands there, I'd really value your feedback:

1. What breaks, or behaves differently from what you'd expect?

2. What would stop you from using it in a real report?

3. Whats missing?

Brutal honesty is welcome. I'd much rather hear it here then read it in a one-star AppSource review.

Kurt and I put together release with new features, improvements and bug fixes:
- Native Gantt chart support
- States (hover, press, selected) for conditional formatting in batch ops
- Line and area charts take a legend field
- Updated data roles for native charts
- Renaming a field with fields replace updates bookmarks too

Thank you to everyone in the community who has been reporting bugs. All of them are fixed in this release (hopefully 😄).

Full changelog in the deck. Upgrade with: uv tool upgrade pbir-cli, or using installers from https://github.com/maxanatsko/pbir.tools/releases/tag/v0.9.33

• Used AviationStack free flight details api
  
• Direct query
  
• Custom visual + local python api
• Used UAE-only flights for POC

I don’t have an “Executive” go-to but my “Working” dashboards end up the same and are a hit.

They’re basically, a header with slicers and relevant info, three grouped sideways bar graphs in the middle, and a table below. This covers a lot of ground and people don’t have to ask how to export to excel.

I’d like to hear what some of yall have cooked up

With the introduction of the new PQ Editor in the desktop application, the Documents.DB connector (Azure Cosmos DB v1) has become a lot less user-friendly.

While I can make changes to the raw query just fine, the Source step being unchangeable using the dialog box makes things much more time-consuming. Does anyone have any other options to make this process faster? For some reason, I can't use the Cosmos DB v2 connector both in the desktop and service.

Hi PowerBI Developers!

I'd love to get your feedback on the first prototype of my timeline slicer! :)

This is still an initial concept and prototype, to demonstrate how the timeline slicer would look and what features it could offer. It is a quick demo video, so I am trying to show main functionalities and settings in that video.

In short, it includes customizable default periods that can be configured in the settings, built-in date, week, month, quarter, and year views, and support for parameters (as shown in the video).

The main idea is to make it as dynamic, flexible, and user-friendly as possible for both end users and BI developers.

I know there are other custom timeline slicers available on Microsoft Marketplace, but from my experience, the ones I've tried haven't been particularly user-friendly, have offered rather limited customization options or takes too much space in reports.

So all of your honest feedback, ideas, improvements are welcome!

Hi everyone!

I recently created a Quality Audit Dashboard using Microsoft Power BI as part of my data analytics learning journey.

The dashboard includes key metrics such as total tasks, total samples, defects, fatal errors, and quality scores. I also created visuals to analyze performance by auditor, supervisor, employee, work location, and month.

I'm still learning Power BI and working on improving my dashboard design and data visualization skills.

I'd really appreciate your feedback and suggestions on what I could improve in this dashboard.

Thank you!

I'm 27M. Hey everyone, my life has been a little different from that of most people, and I don't have a strong educational background.

Right now, I'm working at a grocery store, but I want to improve my life and learn some stable, valuable skills that can help me earn a reliable income.

I've come across these four skills:

Python

SQL

Excel/Spreadsheets

Power BI/Tableau

I don't know much about these skills or their demand, competition, value, and future prospects.

Technology is constantly evolving, trends are changing, and AI is replacing some jobs. The value of different skills also changes over time.

Before I start learning, I want to understand whether these are the right skills to invest my time in for a stable career and income in the long run.

I'd appreciate your advice. Should I go for these skills, or would you recommend something else?

Ok everyone give me your best landing pages for your reports, i googled and saw some cool ones. I want to refresh our report landing page and want some inspiration.

Hello All, Has anyone worked on a requirement to automate the power bi report development end to end..like a chat interface ingests the user story and then the reports are created by identifying the relevant tables in snowflake etc?

Please if somebody can help, that will be great

I need advice on choosing the right storage mode for a Power BI report. The business is pushing for DirectQuery because it eliminates the need for scheduled dataset refreshes, but I'm not sure if it's the right approach for this requirement.

Data sources:

- Two Oracle databases hosted on different servers.

- Around 10K+ records in each table.

Requirements:

- A couple of report pages with simple visuals, including a table visual combining fields from both tables using a 1:1 relationship on Material ID.

- Compare specific fields for each Material ID across both sources to check whether they match and create an alignment status/column.

- Add a couple of calculations based on this alignment status.

My concern is whether implementing these comparisons, calculated fields, and measures in DirectQuery would be challenging, particularly when translating the logic into SQL queries across two separate Oracle sources. Could this also introduce performance issues?

Would DirectQuery be a reasonable choice for this scenario, or should I reconsider the approach?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone with practical experience in Power BI and multiple DirectQuery sources.

Wholesale distribution. We commit purchase orders at a SKU level, but forecast at a product group level, so the two only line up at group level. I'm not sure how structure the model, I currently have two DIM tables one at Product Group level and one at SKU level but I would rather not duplicate them and end up with two competing product group dimensions.

Also how do I set up a rolling the stock forecast forward in M. I'm currently using a calculated column showing Opening stock plus cumulative inflows, less cumulative demand at a Product Group level, with demand capped at what is actually available so a month cannot consume stock that is not there. This approach works while demand stays at or under available stock however, the moment a month's demand exceeds available inventory, the cap kicks in, and every month after that is wrong, because the cumulative formula keeps using raw demand instead of the capped closing. The error is silent and compounds downstream. Another approach I've tried is pusing this to Power Query using List.Accumulate over each product group's months in date order, carrying closing into the next opening, I haven't quite got this working yet and don't know if this is the right approach or if I should be trying something else?

If you have modelled inventory levels against a monthly forecast what did you do?

The other day this problem came up for me, where when signing into Power BI desktop, I would correctly type in my credentials, approve the sign in on my Microsoft Authenticator app, and then it would suddenly say "Something Went Wrong" and not elaborate.

On the Microsoft Admin Console, it says the sign in attempts were successful, even though I know they weren't.

A couple important notes is this all started a few days ago when it prompted me to update my password, and I still have no problems logging into Power BI online or Microsoft in general.

Does anyone have any advice on how I can fix this? None of the advice from AI was helpful.

With so many modern charting tools, technical indicators, and AI-powered trading platforms available today, I'm curious whether traditional candlestick charts are still a go-to choice for traders and financial analysts.

Personally, I think there's still value in seeing price action through open, high, low, and close (OHLC) data. Candlesticks make it easier to understand price movements, spot potential patterns, and analyze market behavior without drowning in too much information.

But I'm curious about a few things:

• Do you still prefer candlestick charts over line charts or other visualizations?
• What features do you consider essential in a good financial charting tool?
• Are traditional candlestick charts enough for your workflow, or do you need more advanced customization and analysis features?

I've also been exploring how financial charts can be made more useful and accessible, especially inside tools like Power BI, where visualizing financial data can be part of a larger analytical workflow.

Would love to hear what traders, developers, and data analysts here think. Are candlestick charts still worth investing time in 2026, or are there better alternatives now?

Custom visual written in TS; each question is posted to a small python api , the api then sends the query to the LLM provider (Gemini in this case). This is a POC

For production, we need to deploy api on Azure services and add auth and security with rate limits properly. simple tbh

Any thoughts/suggestions are appreciated